If Agile lets you inspect and adapt freely, then at what point does Agile does stop being Agile?
Agile is built around the simple value proposition that shipping products earlier, more often, and with more direct feedback from customers creates better products. We might even call this "The Golden Rule" of Agile. (This certainly verges on being a philosophy.)
If you believe that, and always act in accordance with that idea, and your team and stakeholders and users do so as well, there's no need for dogma. You will deliver great products and life will be good.
But the sad truth is a significant fraction of people are skeptics and cynics and doggerels and hairsplitters and technocrats and incompetents and martinets and apathetics and fusspots; in simple terms, they're only human.
So instead of one Golden Rule we have law after law after law and with law comes lawyers on both sides (or pharisees if you like.)
But if you inspect and adapt according to the Golden Rule, you'll always be doing Agile because you focus on the outcome and not the process.
Either you ship or you don't. Either you add value or you don't. Either you talk to users or you dont.
Are you saying that any team that "ships products earlier, more often, and with more direct feedback" is following Agile? If thats all that Agile is then why do we need whole books on Agile, coaches, training seminars etc. if it can be summed up in one short sentence?
EDIT: Your definitions is also a tautology - nobody is going to argue that you should ship products late and with little feedback from customers.
When you make it a procedure - especially when you make it a rigid one. "Let us take this rigid approach to become agile" is just as stupid as it sounds.
> nobody is going to argue that you should ship products late and with little feedback from customers.
No. But some approaches result in more customer feedback than others do. So in practice, people do in fact choose to ship with less customer feedback.
Getting good at agile means getting good at inspect and adapt.