No, and Jeffries' analogy suffers the same strawman fallacy.

The proper analogy would be if no one knew the rules of football/baseball and everyone ended up playing Calvinball instead, then you could say that football/baseball was broken. If following the rules of football produced a product of its own if the rules were followed, it shouldn't matter that other people can follow those rules better.

Or you can point at Monopoly and the fact that so many people destroy the game by playing the "Free Parking gets the kitty" rule and use that as an excuse that Monopoly is a terrible game. Well, Monopoly is a terrible game, even as designed, so that one works.

It's not about how well people follow the "rules" of agile. It's that most everyone who tries doesn't understand the intent of agile.

I would argue that most of the attempts at codifying agile, from Extreme Programming through whatever the latest fad is, are all also wrong. That if you codify agile at all, you're missing the point.

In my experience, the OP article is correct: You need good developers on the team. That's it. That's the secret to success. The methodology you use is nearly irrelevant, though some methodologies do more harm than good.

The fact that XP's flagship project (C3) was an abject failure should have been a clue that maybe it wasn't as good as people want to believe it is. Maybe Kent Beck wasn't "doing agile right" either?