Should I take a potentially poison pill?

Hello all, prospective manager here. For some background I have about 8 years experience, mostly at the same company with 6 years on my current team that I helped build out. Always gotten great reviews and promoted every couple years. My manager has basically been told he has too many direct reports and he should hire a VP. He graciously informed me he was told this, and asked me if that would bother me, and if I was interested in managing the team eventually. I had sat down with the execs, pitched my case, and they seemed on board.

Here's the problem. My manager has hired another internal manager to lead half the team and given him the two best employees, both PhDs, as he does not have much technical background in our field. He has given me the other half of the team with three employees – a recent Masters graduate that is already on a PIP, a recent hire who was laid off in his last role and so far has been 100% remote and continues to push their in office start date back and generally misses a lot of work/deadlines, and another recent hire who is thankfully a very hard worker and pays attention to deadlines but is not necessarily a genius in a very technical field.

The past 6 months I have been de facto leading them as a Senior Analyst, which has been stressful to juggle with my regular duties as an individual contributor. I spend at least couple hours a week with each helping them finish any work that requires critical thinking. The team culture is very lax, which I think my manager has cultivated because previously he had a team of strong ICs (before internal turnover) he could trust and he was mostly remote even pre-pandemic. He otherwise is very brilliant, but has heavily relied on strong ICs to fulfill his vision.

Another frustration is that while I will be promoted to Lead next year, I will not be promoted to manager for another 1-2 years generally just due to HR/company progression policies. My manager tells me I need to be able to influence people without authority, which is very fair, but there is some frustration with communication over time off and with him assigning tasks to my teams that then take precedent over what I assign them. I also do not really feel comfortable reprimanding them excessively given in their mind I am not their manager yet, which he tends to agree with as he wants me to have a good relationship with them.

Anyway, am I being set up for failure? I have escalated the issues with the PIP employee for over a year and he just finally got put on the PIP this month. I was not involved in the hiring decision for him. I did naively endorse the current remote employee (along with others on the team) because he interviewed well – learned a lesson there. So that leaves me with one reliable employee and my boss generally does not like to hear bad news about the other employees (who does?), and would potentially put their failure partially on me.

Basically I want to move up for the compensation and because I am passionate about my field and want to eventually lead a program – so this is an opportunity to get my foot in that door. On the flip side, I can just keeping cruising as a strong IC, let someone else take this potentially poison pill, and wait for a better opportunity that may not come.

Or do I need to have a candid conversation with my boss? I have expressed some of these ideas and could probably get the PIP employee let go, though I have been micromanaging him relentlessly to try to improve his work and give him a fair shake. We do have a potential internal candidate who is very good/passionate and I would love to manage – would you pull that trigger?

Not sure exactly what I am looking for. Partly venting – just interested in perspectives from people with management experience on dealing with weak teams.