I have never yet seen a software team, team lead, engineering manager, etc. that knew how to estimate accurately how much time a large software project will tak

I have never yet seen a software team, team lead, engineering manager, etc. that knew how to estimate accurately how much time a large software project will take. I have repeatedly seen people saying things like "the rewrite will only take a year", "we'll have this done in two months", etc. which turned out to be wrong by orders of magnitude. I really think that, unless we're doing very repetitive stuff, the best we can do is give rough estimates on small deliverables, i.e. stories in a sprint. If what you write is true - deadlines are important - and what I write is true - it's almost impossible to estimate how long it takes to develop complex software - then there's a mismatch that needs to be addressed somehow. I thought that this was what Scrum was designed to solve (by continuously updating estimates), but you seem to think that we need harder deadlines. If so, I'm not convinced that this is actually feasible in most cases.