This is the truth of course. Developers develop in spite of the current process management buzz word not because of it. With that said a daily 15 min standup seems to strike a reasonable balance for me/us personally between creating awareness within the team that might not have come up otherwise whilst not stealing too much time.
I feel what you said about the 'process' creeping in, however, if you don't mind, allow me to counter: My first N years had no version control, but that is not sufficient in my opinion to say it hasn't improved things.
Seriously, it was only "main" when I started at Apple 26 years ago. Our version control was such that when someone wanted to edit a file it was "checked out", locked to others on the team, until it was checked back in.
It worked surprisingly well (obviously no merge conflicts for one thing). I doubt anyone would suggest going back to something as simplistic (but I have to admit Git feels way too complicated than it should at times).
I too was coding 30 years or so ago. Back then we may not have had git, but we certainly had RCS and I recall switching to CVS.
There's a huge difference between a "daily progress meeting" and "sensible development". I too have seen a lot of process creeping into things and I'm glad I'm getting close to retirement.
The first 25 years of my career as a programmer we never had daily stand-ups, had never heard of them. We shipped.
Something about all the "process" that has crept into the job over the last decade or so has really turned me off.