Yes, managing software development is generally hard and there is no silver bullet. But I do think that the methods that I commonly encountered before Agile were better in terms of both developer stress and software quality.

Interestingly, in many ways they also weren't all that different from what Agile is intending to bring. They still involved something analogous to "sprints", they still allowed for course correction and pivoting during development, and all of that.

Agile seems to position itself as the opposite of "waterfall", but outside of large corporate environments, I'd never seen a shop that actually used waterfall as described by the Agile community.