The truth is that the manifesto may as well be fiction.
I'm talking about reality... what the industry actually practices as "Agile." That's why you read it all the time: because it's true.
Maybe it's true at some companies, but it has nothing to do with agile / scrum, but letting non-tech people who love confrontation take over engineering leadership from engineers who are afraid of confrontation (which sounds like the disaster it is).
Robert Martin (one of the creators of the agile manifesto) explains it quite well in ,,Clean Code'' presentation:
The whole presentation should be a must watch by all engineers so that they understand what _is_ agile to the point when they know it better than product / project managers / non-tech people.
It's hard to get a better description than the original source, and no non-tech person has authority to override the real agile at that point.
It's basically a bunch of experienced engineers getting together for a weekend warning inexperienced engineers about newbie mistakes, like obsessing too much about new shiny tools / frameworks / processes created by people from the past, or leaving mess behind.
At Google we were doing mostly agile actually (didn't really have any complex process, but had quarterly goals to check ourselfs and get feedback, also weekly check if we are going in the right direction).
,,this week'' snippets about what we're going to do this week.
All light stuff to make sure that it doesn't hinder real coding work.
Cross team work was much more messy of course, but inside teams this worked fine.
At another small company I worked it was almost the same, we just didn't call it agile.
