The upper limit for senior people before they start to get pissed off is probably: the lowest of 10 minutes per week person, or 60 minutes for a weekly meeting, or 20 minutes for a daily meeting. So with a team of 8, you can either have a 60-minute meeting or daily 16-minute meetings. With a team of 4, you're limited to 40 minutes for a weekly meeting or 8 minutes of status reporting for a daily meeting.
Standups are good insofar as they allay toxic suspicion that <Person X> isn't contributing. They're like prisons: not innately good, but the aspect of human nature that they exist to control or mitigate is worse.
Of course, most seasoned people realize that the game of status reporting is like playing Scrabble. It's not about dropping the 100-point words. It's about not opening up the board (and getting nagged with follow-on questions).
Now, I believe you that most of these Agile methodologies were designed with better intentions. I absolutely agree. But they devolve. We've seen that, over and over and over. They don't fix things. They make tolerably broken things more intolerably broken. If you're in an environment where business runs the show and engineers just implement (i.e. business-driven engineering) then the right thing to do, often, is to become politically inert, silently learn new skills, and save your energy (slack) while opportunities are few so you can step up when the business-driven engineering regime goes away (or when you change companies). Scrotum gets in the way of that, and by putting such an emphasis on micro-estimates (numbers that will always turn into political tools) it generates politics.