yes and no. "agile" has become doctrinaire and "one size fits all." i miss the eXtreme Programming era where standups, pair-programming, test-first, timeboxing, etc. were all "tools in a toolbox" to be applied as needed. i think the OP is experiencing a world where they're told "oh, here's AGILE. you have to do everything in this book," which i think i would push back on as well.

but... if you're going to do standups and retrospectives... i agree with you. do them synchronously. the idea is to get everyone to listen to everyone else. the reason they're STAND-ups is 'cause everyone's supposed to be standing so there's motivation to keep them short. this often makes it difficult to do "follow the sun" development. i quit a job a couple years back because my management insisted my engineers on the US west coast be included in standups for teams in Pune (India).

and that 1-on-1's are for surfacing issues that haven't come up elsewhere seems like received wisdom among my peer group. it seems to work well for me, so +1 on that too.

the phrase "when done correctly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. i bet people who have bad experience with these practices were in situations where they weren't done correctly.

one of my problems with environments where management thinks devs are interchangeable bots motivated only by money is that there is zero motivation for management to change their approach when it doesn't work. if they think the only thing that motivates people is money, they think they have to add more money or fire their devs and get devs that are appropriately motivated by cash.