I recently dealt with the same thing. We had an experienced CTO come in and implement a “big company” style of Agile. In all fairness, there was a lack of process that needed to be addressed, but the pendulum swung very much too far in the other direction. He left the company and I stepped up to fill the gap. First thing I did was quantify the amount of time the team was spending in meetings and it was over 25%. Those meetings weren’t even efficiently grouped, so with context switching it was even worse.

Luckily I was in a position to change things and consolidated a lot of the ceremonies. I kept more of the process in place for our offshore partner team because the communication burden was higher.

So I guess my two take aways are that time in meetings needs to be evaluated with how meetings are grouped to avoid too much context switching and allow for folks to get into a flow. The other is that how strictly you adhere to “textbook” scrum really depends on the composition of the team. More junior teams or teams that are insolated from the larger business context benefit more from more process imho.