> always been the real reason

It can't "always" have been the reason. The original intent of agile was that it was by the developers, for the developers. It's unlikely the originators of agile decided they needed to treat themselves like "school children"

Standups weren't in the original Agile Manifesto. Standups are most directly a Scrum-specific thing. Scrum was just one of the contributors to the Agile Manifesto, alongside Extreme Programming and some others.

Scrum has always been the one with more "ceremonies" and more middle management involvement at each step, adding Product Owners and Scrum Masters as entirely new classes of middle management. Given how often teams devolve into "Scrumterfall", that sometimes seems like the "natural state" of Scrum. Scrum was designed to make Waterfall companies happier with Agile. Scrum has all these ceremonies and extra middle managers that are just Waterfall things done more often and closer to the engineering team.

It's so very easy with hindsight to believe that Scrum was the "wolf in sheep's clothing" among the Agile Manifesto writers that didn't always believe in the goals of the Agile Manifesto. Especially "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools": just because they are called "ceremonies" doesn't make them magically stop being meetings and processes and tools. It's kind of worse than that because ceremonies implies rituals implies religious tones of control.

I certainly feel like Standups are a bad idea designed to make Managers happy. The kind of middle managers, especially, that feel some command-and-control need to treat developers like "school children" because they don't understand what the developers actually do and don't really care. But maybe I've just had too many terrible "Scrum Masters" in my life (what a terrible term, what an awful job role, what a waste of middle management bureaucracy) and there's some "ideal" Scrum I've never seen where that isn't the case.

(We probably would be far better off if more developers had listened more to the Extreme Programming side of the Agile Manifesto house, despite being confused/turned off by things like Pair Programming that made it "extreme". Though it was also things like Pair Programming that made Standups seem especially silly to XP, since you never not had someone to bounce blockers immediately off of in Pair Programming.)

The people that invented Scrum aren't developers. They pretend to be, but make all their money with courses and management consultancy.

And go try to fit "required daily meetings" on the Agile Manifesto to see how well it fits. (The people that made this one were mostly developers. All working in a very specific area making very similar software, but developers nonetheless.)