Everything is susceptible to being co-opted when it becomes popular, and sometimes even when it doesn't. Any religion, any political platform, any protest move

Everything is susceptible to being co-opted when it becomes popular, and sometimes even when it doesn't. Any religion, any political platform, any protest movement, anything with any kind of a group identity can be misused by those who want to have that identity without having to actually meet the qualifications. Expecting a one-page statement of a development philosophy to not be susceptible to that is expecting the impossible. Agile at least pointed out that the way development was being done was inhumane. That resonated with a large number of people. People wanted that more humane development style - that's why agile had so much appeal. Calling agile a "framework" seems off, though. It was a philosophy, or perhaps a set of values. A framework is something more codified and rigid - which is exactly the problem, that people tried to make agile codified and rigid. "We're going to be agile according to a rigidly defined process" is an oxymoron. But not being a framework, not being rigidly defined, there was nothing formal that stopped anyone from putting the "Agile" label on things that were antithetical to the Agile Manifesto. But they are in fact antithetical - it's like the practitioners never actually understood the manifesto, or else were never willing to actually change to correspond to what it said.