I'm so sick of dumb project managers, they want "updates" but then they reply with "I didn't understand any of that but it sounds like it's going well"

I literally have a PM who does it all the time, at this point I could talk to him in another language, and he'd just say "Great, sounds like its going well" then proceed to ask for updated a couple hours later *hardfacdpalm*

How do you deal with someone like this?

I've got this dev at my workplace that is terrible to work with, he's 2 main reasons why I say this:
1. He has no clue about team work, every piece of code he writes is written as if he is the only person that has to ever touch that
2. He's overtly protective and opinionated on things that make no sense, they're non standard "rules" that he sets and enforces by replacing others code with his own (often times you see quite large PRs and after inspection you realize he rewrote parts of code to follow his style). These "rules" also take up a really long time to follow and would make any actually experienced developer question this guy's knowledge, one example of this is where he repeats the same code over multiple components for "encapsulation reasons" and God forbid you create a global helper of some sort, he'll straight up remove it the next chance he gets. Another example is that all his components or utilities live inside 1 base directory, so you have roughly 300+ components in a /components directory, all with non standard names so you can't tell which is related to which.

I hate working with this person, it's annoying and it also sucks because he's sort of a more "senior" Dev so managers take his side most of the time.

So we got a new developer
And his first task's PR is a pure copy paste off a random website that I managed to find in less than 1 minute of searching for the feature on Google

And I mean that's cool and all, because we all do that sometimes
But my oh my, he didn't even bother changing it one bit, hell it didn't even fit the purpose and it was weirdly imported as a separate class instead of it being added as an extension on the existing base class

Like wtf man, at least put some effort into the 5 minutes it took you to find, copy and paste that in

I just overestimated the fuck out of some tasks because I knew the client would come back last minute and cut the deadline in half.

2 days later they do just that, luckily I overestimated the work so now it's all good.

The annoying thing is that they keep doing this, but since I work for an agency I have no power to drop this client since they give us a lot of work, so that sucks