While I too despise Scrum, the causation could be runming the other way: the Bosses that have a better team could be more likely to let them run without major pressure.
Top programming talent may still need to be managed (and in fact may need to be managed more than lower quality talent). The sweet spot is to hire top programming talent who is also good at intra-team communication and can organize themselves with little direction from management except to be informed about outside factors like client priorities.
Even better is top talent who can also interface directly with the client when necessary (not necessarily all the time) and doesn't need everything first filtered through a manager.
I've worked with teams like this in the past and it was always a pleasure. Most of them were fairly experienced devs and knew the value of email, phone calls, and water cooler talk (serendipitous discussions which led to valuable information being exchanged). Despite the lack of "modern" productivity tools like text messages, chat apps, and Slack, we were able to get stuff done efficiently.
We had weekly meetings which were productive and useful, and actually helped identify if anything was falling through the cracks. Nobody got bored because the meetings were actually helpful.
If CEO can hire a 100$ scrum master to save a 1000$ failing team, it's much cheaper than hiring 2000$ successful team. That's probably what they're thinking
Sadly the $1000 team doesn't get saved by the $100 scrum master though.
You are 100% right that legacy management falls for the SCRUM sales pitch.
At one company I worked at the scrum salesman basically bullied the executive team by saying "You don't want to be the last company to adopt scrum do you?!!??!"
I don't think that's true at all. If there's time-to-market pressure (for example), then you really want that $2000 team to deliver on time. "Saving" the $1000 failing team with a $100 scrum master may not be good enough.
Also, please at least acknowledge that your numbers are completely made up and may have no basis in reality. It might be a $1000 team only if they deliver on time, but the overages might push that to $5000. Or whatever. See, I can completely make up numbers to support my point too.
This problem exists at big tech and startup, in companies that spend fractional multipliers of the average salary on engineers as well as those who pay poorly.
In this environment, if your solution is "hire better people', you can't- there isn't any
The people who implement Scrum are insecure managers. They don't understand the development process, don't trust their staff to just get on with it, and need constant reassurance that their project/product is making progress.
So it would have to be both: the devs are good and don't need hand-holding, and the manager is able to deal with the lack of transparency that "it'll be done when it's done" comes with.
