The alternative from people who criticize agile is coming up with your own process or no process at all. Just do what you guys want that makes you productive.
After a multi-year scrum initiative where I work, we had a new leader come in who basically said this. "Do whatever you want." It was a nightmare (still is).
While it took several years to get people on board with Scrum, it finally started to pay off, where everyone was speaking the same language, dependencies were being called out and put into other team's backlogs, and the various ceremonies started to bear fruit, improving how the team was working.
When that playbook went out the window it was chaos, and it's been that way ever since. No one knows what anyone else is doing. Work is being duplicated all over the place. There are no priories... where everything is a priority and it shifts by the hour with new things being added. Everyone is in a firefight and doesn't see a way out.
The "do your own thing" approach probably works great for small teams and organizations, but quickly falls apart in large organizations with dozens or hundreds of teams trying to work together. The new guy who threw the playbook out the window was from a company 1/10th the size of ours. He doesn't understand the scale and that has been very clear.
I'm not advocating for SAFe here, I think that's its own nightmare. But some kind of shared framework so teams can work together and respect the boundaries of other teams is not a bad thing... whatever that framework is.
Within Scrum there is the idea of the retrospective, to adjust things as needed. If a team isn't seeing value in standups, planning poker, etc... don't do them. Things like that really only impacts the internal team, and the larger organizational cooperation can still exist. For example, my team never assigned points as a group, because it didn't make sense to us. The effort involved in a story is dependent on the skill and familiarity of the person working on it.
