> The whole exercise felt like taking attendance.

In my experience, almost anyone who insists on synchronous, in-person standups is doing so because they want them to function this way, whether consciously or unconsciously.

I also suspect that standups with no active brevity constraint frequently come about not because of a lack of leadership but because they're actually a means for disordered thinkers to feel productive, which I think goes part of the way towards explaining why you see such irrational attachment to standups even among ICs.