I completely am in favor of date-bound delivery.

However the point of the weekly cadence is that the business does care about adjusting scope and priority towards hitting that deadline on May 23, so that they know what they're going to get on May 23 and have the power to adjust it.

Especially if the goal of what is delivered on that date is not clearly defined. It almost never is.

Most projects can be summed as "give me $X, I'll come back in 6 months, and ask for more time and money". or "here you go"... "that's not what I wanted".

It's a key risk mitigation toward a hard date to know every week if you're still getting what you wanted.

Velocity is overblown as a metric. It's one metric among many that can signal a few things (e.g. quality problems because bug fixes are overtaking features) but isn't as much of a lever as some say.

Yep I agree. Iterations are still good, demos are still good, ever-evolving scope discussions are still good, regardless of the overarching methodology.