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...

>"So you'd prefer for all this project management drama and power struggle to be invisible?"

Well project managers can have their dramas. Just do not involve developers. Or what is even better - get the fuck out and leave it to people who can do things without drama.

>"All this scaffolding is not a cult. It exists to democratize the process. Your personal comfort is irrelevant to the results."

Pile of BS. It exists to feed whole layer of self serving people who contribute very little and grow like a cancer.

In my career I was lucky. I am an independent software developer. Designed and developed many products for various clients (including some of my own ventures) and have managed without Agile, Scrum and the likes. My largest products - I had teams of up to 35 people under me and somehow we've survived.

On few occasions I had pleasure to be on some of those meetings as a visitor - felt nothing but disgust. Again luckily I was spared from direct participation