Hear, hear.

I think higher management likes to believe that those things (sprints, scrum, Jira and standups) provide a safety net against lazy employees not working hard enough, so they cling to them. Of course, they actually do little and are pretty easy to game. Their failure to magically make all software work predictable and deterministic and all developer time fungible actually means that you still need a manager involved and close to the work to identify people who BS their way through everything and take way longer than they should.

I'd rather be in an environment where you are given access to simple tools like kanban to prioritize and track work, and for people who don't deliver, the manager just fires them (maybe with one warning).