This is the no-true scotsman argument. I have yet to see scrum implemented in a way that wasn't taken too seriously, that didn't make the team's life harder, etc, etc. It's just too easy to say they're all doing it wrong, if it's almost always done wrong.
Maybe the reality is that it only works for some kinds of programming, when not taken too seriously. But then why bother at all?
Not in my experience, no. In fact, it's pretty nearly the farthest thing from the getting shit done thing I've actually dealt with.
Just getting shit done doesn't mean bullshit arbitrary time-slices, half-day postmortems at the end of said timeslices, insertion of "project managers" who know little to nothing of either the actual business problem being address or the technical means used to address it, people working on a parallel svd implementation having to explain their work daily to web designers, blah blah blah.
The whole thing is a money making cult for the people who invented it, and a means of empowering a class of employees (project managers) who should exist only in very small numbers, if at all.
The claim seems to be that if you don't use scrum, you will just end up doing some horrible waterfall. This is a false dichotomy.
Kanban and scrum are the revenge of the untalented and the humanities majors who would like to have technology jobs without having to learn anything about, you know, technology.
Why not just learn about methodology instead?
One of my least favorite aspects of the whole thing is having someone with little to no actual cs/math/ee/programming background tell me that since he/she/it used it for some trivial web programming, clearly my group doing r&d in machine learning were a bunch of morons who just didn't _get_ it because we thought it was incompatible with the kind of work we did.
Maybe the reality is that it only works for some kinds of programming, when not taken too seriously. But then why bother at all?