There is what I call "big A" agile and "little A" agile.
I am a believer in agile methodologies, and generally subscribe to a lot of the underlying principles like doing what makes sense, having the flexibility to change your process, doing work in small pieces where you can continuously have a tangible thing to play with, involving the customer/stakeholders throughout, etc.
That said, Agile has become a business, with companies offering their flavor and tooling around it (and of course their training and consulting and certification), which then gets sold to management and then they're paying $2000 /a year/ so you can tall yourself a "Certified SAFe agile grandmaster" or whatever. Agile can also butt up against business realities, old guard management, customers, and so on. Management also often can't help themselves with trying to measure and control things, and you again start to see a lot of the old tropes creep in because its hard to gather consistent metrics when a team changes how they track issues or manage their work flow. And few managers can breath if they can't somehow figure out how many bricks of code you're laying a day.
Where I work we've fallen into a pretty good workflow where we took the bits that made sense, made up our own bits, and threw out stuff that didn't work. Pointing poker? Waste of time for us. We just discuss it and usually quickly come to a consensus. All the various story point "rules", nuts to it.. we basically call them "small, medium, big" and go from there. Stories having to be "1 at most 2 days work" .. hell no, the nature of what we do has way too much overhead to iterate that quickly. If something is gonna take 4 days, we say its a big task and move on rather than try to break it into ackward chunks. Rigid adherence to the concept of a release.. nope, if we decide we need another sprint we argue the point with management and usually just extend the thing. We also don't involve the entire damn program in release planning. Conceptually it makes sense, practically it just didn't work for us. Releases are planned by leads and product owners and dolled out like ye olden dinosaurs did. We're a large multi-team company so we do the scrum-of-scrums (just leads/product owners) thing, and we do daily standups, and yeah, as a lead/pseudo product owner I probably spend 1/3 of my day in meetings but aside from the daily standup, and maybe 1 hour sprint planning every 2 weeks, most people are relatively free to just get their shit done.
EDIT: since I'm ranting.. totally agree on the name things. I actually think that hindered adoption somewhat because you feel like an idiot talking about "stories" and "sprints" and such. This is /finally/ starting to change, with terminology like "iteration" catching on vs sprint and "team lead" making a comeback over "scrum master"... though I think we're stuck with "story" for the time being.
