> Pretty much everything that's been layered on top

...and that /is/ topic of discussion every time this discussion happens

Every agile criticism conversation goes like this

A: agile as practiced is bad

B: but the manifesto is solid

It's predictable as the sun rising

Because it's true.

Scrum is like Spaghetti Carbonara in America. The ingredients are simple and there's a tiny bit of technique involved that anybody can figure out after a few tries. For some reason though almost everybody that makes it decides that they know better than the people that invented it and so adulterates it with peas and onions and garlic and cream and cream cheese and Italian seasoning and parsley and chives until it ends up being Olive Garden Alfredo. If they wanted Carbonara then they would have cooked the Carbonara, not the waterfall with a bunch of JIRA workflows and four-hour meetings layered on top. They just did what they would have done anyway while attempting to sound fancy via obfuscation.

It's not just Agile but the same applies to DevOps.

DevOps is a culture. It can also be the specific subset of highly skilled individuals who were part of or an outcome of said cultures cross pollination. Today DevOps most often means fairly unskilled person hitting pipelines with hammer.

In the end, the same old people with the same old commercial interests adopted the term in a way that benefited them but changed the meaning of the term because change was not actually something anyone wanted.

And usually:

C: Therefore you’re doing it wrong.

And once an “agile guru” enters the conversation:

D: You need my book / seminar / services.

Any principle or practice falls apart when tied to an economy. See also: religion, politics, society at large. I don't foresee that changing in our lifetimes, so make money doing it the wrong way, and do it the right way in your free time.

I don’t agree with that though, plenty of places practice agile well. Maybe big corporations don’t practice it well, but startups often do agile correctly and understand the philosophy.