When accompanied by promises of a less punishment: Yes.

And so I think even with a guilty please, there ought to be a requirement for the prosecution to prove the case. Maybe lower the bar a little bit, but not much. And that is indeed how pleas work most places.

Few jurisdictions have US-style plea bargains where the prosecutor can negotiate large "discounts" to the potential maximum sentencing and get judges to agree.

To me, a country that allows that and where they are frequently taken does not have a functioning justice system.

There's also a significant difference with respect to the coercion when sentences are long, and when the possible variation in sentence length is huge, and the US stands out as particularly bad with respect to both of those factors as well.

The usual standard in the UK is for a sentence to get a reduction of around 1/3 for a guilty plea. The situation I hear of in the US where people are threatened with a 537 year sentence if they plead not guilty or a 3 month sentence if they plead guilty is a travesty and surely leads to vast levels of injustice.