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From what I've heard, aerospace and automotive are still largely using waterfall.

Yes. And it doesn’t work very well. Lots of late deliveries or reduced project scopes (often still late and over budget, but mot as bad).

Increasingly, iterative models are used and those are much better. For some reason since it isn’t Scrum people still insist they do Waterfall even though they do nothing like it.

Planes fall from the sky far less than, say, some agile/scrum-based web app shitting itself constantly, which happens all the time. Maybe waterfall has its place.

Eh. Waterfall adds risk to iterative approaches, not value. Wait 3 years to do integration testing because that’s what the schedule says. The smart projects get better quality and use iterative models.

Additionally, there are other iterative models than Scrum. That's pretty much the worst one out there and its only value is to inexperienced teams needing training wheels or overbearing management that doesn't trust the team.

Good example is SpaceX vs. all the others

Even worse. When I worked in that sector, the government simultaneously mandated that we use agile methodologies, and also that we do waterfall things. Doing agilefall like that was the dumbest possible thing, because we got the benefits of neither and the weaknesses of both.

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