Every project I take on these days has a pre-production phase. This phase is 1-3 sprints. It involves speccing sophisticated systems, designing UX and several spikes to evaluate technology. These all have outputs in the form of documents. Even the spikes should produce a short document outlining the technology recomendations and the reasons for the recommendation.
Similarly, in a project with a more research orientation, we perform spikes which involve building various prototypes and documenting their feasibility.
None of this conflicts with agile principals nor creates a situation in which engineers and designers are pressured to forsake, "building it right".
In fact the only differences between this approach and "waterfall" is that there is frequent accountability and there is protection for the development team because they are still choosing what comes into a sprint.
I generally find that whatever form the various criticisms of agile take over the years, there are generally two impulses really at work underneath them. Either management is trying to undermine the protections agile and scrum create for the dev team by violating the "only pigs talk" principal or it's developers trying to avoid regular accountability so they can build their castles in the air.
To be 100% clear, I'm not even saying that approach never works. There are phenomenal developers who disappear for weeks and come back with magic. But often enough, developers who cannot deliver try to perform the same act and their incompetence sinks a project. The development team cannot collectively afford the risk to find out which kind of developer you might be and therefore you owe them accountability. We all owe each other accountability.