@pbarker that's a good point about consultancy, interesting.
To me it's pretty simple fundamentally - all of these methodologies are basically trying to compensate for poor tech management by 'forcing' sanity via a process.
The fundamental error is thinking that you can do that bottom-up, you can't, poor managers will simply adapt things to suit their own ends.
So it was flawed from the start, of course the original concept doesn't match reality, because it never could.
And of course managers always warp and adapt it to basically become 'weekly super top-down meetings only with different words', because they have the power, and they want to do that.
Scrum is infinitely worse, as you just end up with weekly meetings but now daily.
The whole thing is a failure.