First of all: one thing is Agile, another thing is Scrum. Scrum is for people that need to be introduced with clear steps to Agile. Imho the best way to do Agile is Kanban but you need mature teams.

In my experience only one company of the six I worked for was doing real Agile. Really short stories, the entire team (inclusing devs) talking to the customer, meetings reduced to a minimum, xp practices all over the place. High value produced, happy customers.

What I noticed about it was that: - every single member of the team believed in it, so no protests - management believed in IT and paid for both agile and xp coaches - hiring was being done right, hr on the first call already clarified what we expected so zero false positives in the hiring phase, new hirings didn't need convincing - slow hiring. The majority of devs hates agile, scrum, pair programming, testing and talking to customers

I left after 5 years to try something new, I still don't find something as good as what I described above.

I then worked for both startups and corp but when they do it, they do it wrong: focused on the process and not on the outcome. People were told "scrum is mandatory because we are doing the digital transformation" or whatever. No measures of the outcome.

Anyway, I firmly believe in Agile, I saw it working in a product company that made billions.

Unfortunately the movement got polluted with consultants that need to sell their service so I personally think you need to get lucky to find a proper place to do it.