I understand that 30 years of experience has to count for something, and maybe some people are fortunate enough to be able to work in an environment that is devoid of all the politics that "Agile" leaves in its wake.

My own years of experience have taught me that estimates will always be sought by the customer. They may even shop around for a better price with a different software vendor/low code solution etc.

If the development team doesn't know the estimate, how is management expected to know? Simply put, management will be held to whatever number (of person hours) they provide, and are also expected to keep it low enough to close the deal. Deadlines are part of doing business, no matter how much we try to dance around that fact. This is why management will immediately turn around and convert story points into hours. These guesstimates will then become deadlines. I hate having deadlines for creative work, and would rather not be bothered by them, but they exist nonetheless.

Until you convince your customers to accept "NFC" and still do business with you, Agile will remain a quixotic idea for the corporate world

Can we please not fool the next generation of software developers into believing all this bs?