I've used Scrum in startups with strong engineering culture, and it helps align engineering and "the business" (sales, marketing, 'what are we building', 'for who'). As an engineer, Scrum helped me expose 'the realities' of software engineering to people who did't get it. For example, the communication helped us change priorities to get value into the product.

Unfortunately, "Agile" is now mainstream bullshit, and, as you say, its now used by the business to just bypass any kind of engineering mastery, and just hire a bunch of junior devs and tell them what to do. "Scrum masters" are just "yes men". Most times, when a company says "We do Agile" they mean "We hired a bunch of script kiddies on a constant death march".

Scrum is about empowering developers, but Scrum itself does not empower them. If the developers are already empowered, then I believe it's useful for communication and direction. If the developers are not already empowered, then Scrum is actively bad. Scrum cannot empower developers. Scrum with disempowered developers is just disempowered developers but now without any kind of SDLC safety net.