"Agile" was defined so vaguely in the beginning that it became a kind of template for everyone to project their (often contradictory) ideas and dreams on to.
Scrum fixed that by being as bad as it was precisely defined.
I can get what the originators of agile were getting at but they explained themselves super badly.
I quickly searched for evidence that it was supposed to be that and found nothing except one essay on medium refuting the idea.
One of the nice things about scrum is that it has an official source who defines it and you can look at it to see what it is and what it is not intended to be.
And Scrum is not even as strict as people paint it, honestly. It retains a lot of the good parts of Agile. It is a basic framework for a self-managing team.
The retrospective is where you can tweak the process, but you can honestly change things anywhere. Bad managers will resist change at any cost and will use Scrum as an excuse to resisting change, but that's true for any methodology.
The problem is it doesn't work when there's micromanagement, it doesn't work when there are waterfall-ish parts (eg: PMs not splitting tickets, QAs hogging releases). Scrum also doesn't work when the development team isn't empowered, or has no domain experts. But most methodologies also don't.
Scrum fixed that by being as bad as it was precisely defined.
I can get what the originators of agile were getting at but they explained themselves super badly.