I did retrospectives at a job for 2.5 years.

I don't think in those ~60 retros, was there one thing we actually changed or accomplished.

Certainly much griping happened. But ultimately very little couod be accomlished, because our problems were beyond the team.

I would love to see retrospectives that worked, just to know what they are like. But so far I mostly see people forced to contribute to the retro, which results in:

1. Generic pats on the back for every minor thing we did. 'Really good job releasing feature X!' 2. Lot's of social compliments and jokes. 'X joined the team! Yay!' 3. Problems that we know about, but aren't tractable. 'The database schema we made 10 years ago really sucks!' but fixing it isn't practical.