Thinking today that the reason that Agile/Scrum are so persistent despite their shortcomings is that there is very little else that teaches engineering managers how to actually run their teams from an operational perspective

It is, in fact, hard to get engineering teams to reliably get shit done in a focused manner. Despite your best wishes, smart people don't just magically poop out complex systems. You have to figure out how to coordinate them in some way.

You have to balance the new work with the support work. You have to figure out some way to be at least occasionally within a reasonable delta of done in a predictable manner. And all of this shit is HARD. Plus engineers are not easy to manage!

So right now we have managers who overdo agile because they have no idea what else to do and at least they got some training on how to do the agile thing, and managers on the other end who refuse agile but also have no other ideas so are often ineffective

Anyway a non-trivial part of my book addresses this but in nowhere near the depth you would need to actually figure out a middle way between "Agile" and "Absolutely nothing" so I wish someone would fill the void