Just let me ask you this: How many years have you been in this game? I came in around 1990, but my first professional coding job wasn't until after I finished a BS in CS and Math in 1995. To me, having the perspective I have, OOP looks in retrospect to have been an enormous boondoggle championed by the Boomer generation. It as all people who did Waterfall, wrote endless requirements documents before coding anything, and did quarterly or even yearly code releases, if you can even imagine that.

Not quite as long as you, but I don't think it's relevant to the point at hand. I entirely agree with what you wrote, and yet I think it's entirely in keeping with what I said. It's the things that actually happened that were the boondoggle, not the paradigm itself.

Similarly I'd like to suggest that there exist situations where waterfall is the obviously correct choice. Yet even then someone could still potentially manage to screw it up.