The reality is that it's not exactly "in the middle" either. It's the simple fact that we must really think and carefully consider these decisions and processes

The reality is that it's not exactly "in the middle" either. It's the simple fact that we must really think and carefully consider these decisions and processes. But the vast majority of people don't want to think. They want recipes to follow. That's why anything that provides a recipe, like scrum, OKRs and so forth, will get sold as a solution for all of our problems. And inevitably lazy people will follow it. It ALWAYS depends on the context in which these processes are in, but most don't want to spend real time figuring this out. Just adopt what Google, Spotify (squads anyone?), <insert hyped company here> uses.