Unfortunately in many places it is indeed a cult and serves to ossify management decisions. We ARE doing Agile, what do you mean? No this person is the scrum master and they tell us what Agile is and then we do it, see?

I have worked at 8 different software places and none of them implemented things in a way I would call "genuinely agile" and most of them were just bad waterfall with more meetings and telling the engineers they are accountable for the bad ideas that are now their job.

CI/CD? How about make that only "Devops" job and then make the exact same undemocratized system before with gatekeepers who spend a significant amount of time blocking your work because they are afraid of things changing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

My point is you would never even have a clue that there is dysfunction at all without these methodologies. These days you at least have some idea in your head how it should be vs how it is.

I think there's something critical being lost in younger people who have never been exposed to the bad old ways and only understand their current situation through memes. We need to get a grip here.