there's a very strong selection bias. we don't really hear about the cases where a team does so-so sprints, it's not great agile/scrum/paganism, but the product evolves, development goes in an okay-ish manner, and there's just not much to talk about.
the whole structure gives enough support, retros surface problems and give sufficient pushback against "features only, no bugs" management style, sprints gave some sane cadence to both devs and product, daily status checks help to detect folks who are stuck, "refinement" forces both sides to actually commit to some kind of written stuff, and "grooming" provides much needed priorization and black comedy relief as the team tries to come up with a non-pedo expression for the activity.
of course, there are valid criticisms of scrum/agile. mostly that it fails to teach developers to realize their need to set boundaries with regards to interaction with "the client", aaand that most managers and projects are non-ideal, underfunded, and devs should leave it, and look for better ones (even with possibly lower pay).
the whole structure gives enough support, retros surface problems and give sufficient pushback against "features only, no bugs" management style, sprints gave some sane cadence to both devs and product, daily status checks help to detect folks who are stuck, "refinement" forces both sides to actually commit to some kind of written stuff, and "grooming" provides much needed priorization and black comedy relief as the team tries to come up with a non-pedo expression for the activity.
of course, there are valid criticisms of scrum/agile. mostly that it fails to teach developers to realize their need to set boundaries with regards to interaction with "the client", aaand that most managers and projects are non-ideal, underfunded, and devs should leave it, and look for better ones (even with possibly lower pay).