Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scrum is just one offshoot of Agile. It has become laden with jargon, Scrum-specific job titles, and rapidly trained Scrum Masters. This obscures the fact that a competent team can start with traditional jobs and roles and use The Manifesto for Agile Software Development as their guide, with some modifications for a remote, Slack/Zoom world. Don't be afraid to dump Scrum.
Agreed. This is more or less what we did in the 90s, deliver quickly and incrementally with right-sized processes. Scrum adds so much complexity, heavy processes and endless meetings it is truly incredible.
I think that's in-line with what you described above. I also think it captured what a lot of folks were trying to do at the time: shorten feedback cycles with RAD, etc.
Scrum - or whatever it is that we see in the wild that's called Scrum - is exactly how you (and the article) describe. The way I see it, the corporate types were scared of the devs actually being self-managing/self-optimizing teams, and decided to turn to an Agile-Lite that they could sell as being new and shiney, but it's still the same command-and-control distrustful crap under the hood.
(Non-Scrum) Agile did a great job at the lower layers (devs, facilitators), but nothing can change that much if you don't affect the management and exec levels.