Only if your Product Owner sucks. Their job is to communicate with all stakeholders, which includes letting the engineering staff have their say. If the engineers feel left out, the product owner isn't doing their job.
> Scrum, in accounting for all the engineer’s time in a tightly managed fashion, discourages innovation — which typically occurs spontaneously and outside of any schedule or system of good predictability.
It doesn't. That is why there is a 'focus factor' baked in, to allow for their time to not be tightly managed.
> Scrum encourages “least amount of work possible” solutions — to conform to it’s strict predictability requirements.
No, it doesn't. The scope of a task becomes a negotiation point for assigning stories into sprints. Sometimes you do something quicker to make the sprint work. But that shouldn't be the default answer. It should just be a talking point. Most of the time, the engineers dictate the effort required to complete a feature, and if they always pick the quickest easier way.... well, then that is a problem that needs to be resolved with the team.
I could go on for every point. But I'm not seeing a single shred of evidence that this author actually understands Scrum. They seem to have been exposed to poor scrum teams, focusing completely on processes and documents, not the communications, negotiations, and discussions that are truly the heart of scrum... admittedly put within a defined structure. I'm not saying Scrum is perfect. It isn't, but you definitely are going to hate it if you have never even seen it done well.