Are there ways to work without quantifying things? Sure. However, anytime you want to systematize something, you need to quantify them.
Still, the GP wants to know if there are ways of working without assigning “arbitrary” points to stuff, i.e. systematization for its own sake. You can certainly quantify things in a meaningful way for your problem.
While scrum and SAFe may be the right approach when working to find a technical fit to a customer problem, where estimates of “complexity” linearly map to some unit of time (conversation factor). These agile implementations fail completely whenever there are non-trivial, system level, non-functional requirements to satisfy. If you don’t have a platform supporting your work, and you’re in the act of building it, you’re no longer doing programming, you’re doing engineering.
In this case, the “systematization” that can be adopted are knowledge based approaches. DoD systems engineering has adopted “knowledge points” as an approach, which ties work to capabilities, which can be utilized at a program level. Which capabilities you have achieved is a metric that demonstrates work, and ties to things you actually want, as opposed to made up metrics, like points, which really tell you how good you are at estimating, but nothing else.
Other approaches are priority based. If you’re in a more service based environment, where work capacity is constant and goals change, a kanban board can be used to limit work in progress and prioritization can be set by either a risk based approach or a using cost of delay.