This is all fine and dandy, but when the executives that should have little to no interaction with engineers (paraphrasing) are also the ones approving the budg

This is all fine and dandy, but when the executives that should have little to no interaction with engineers (paraphrasing) are also the ones approving the budgets and cutting the checks to fund projects, you kinda have to respond with estimates/budgets/timeframes on when they can realize some ROI on their initiatives. I totally agree that agile can go wrong a million different ways, and sprints can often lead to scrambling at the end of them if not managed well, but those are all process failures and should be fixed by the Product Owners/Scrum Masters whose job it is to balance out workloads and fight to manage realistic expectations. Just because things can feel rushed and stressful doesn't mean you need to jump to the other end of the spectrum and fight for no estimates and no progress checkpoints. There needs to be someone pushing for delivery of value at all times, otherwise you'll end up with devs building beautiful things that no user gives a fuck about.