I have also experienced it in person. The customer, which was their only customer, and works with many similar contractor businesses, made noises that they want their contractors to "be more agile". So a lot of them just cargo-culted something and said, "we're more agile now!"
My previous employer declared a daily stand-up meeting--with mandatory attendance at 8:45 AM, the flexible hours be damned--crammed the entire team (minus customer support) of ~20 people around the walls of the manager's corner office, and proceeded to waste 45 minutes every morning, as everyone listened to everyone else justify their existence to the boss. Needless to say, I was already looking for other jobs, and doubled down on the application rate after that.
At my current employer, we just changed the day and time of our weekly status meeting, moved it to the conference table in the server lab, where the testers in adjoining offices can theoretically hear it and elect to participate, and said, "we're more agile now!"
The customer has absolutely no in-house ability to evaluate the effectiveness of external software development teams, so they just have to take their contractors' at their word.
I think you can probably guess who the customer is.
Agile means small teams focused on one project communicating constantly with the client in a feedback loop.
If any of these elements is missing, you are not doing agile, you are doing the same thing most companies do, but with some agile pieces and labels attached to it.
It's like saying you are on a keto diet, but you eat ice cream, or that you are for democracy as long as the press is controlled by the state.
It's kinda saddening that from everything OP said, the only take you got from the message is whether a soul-crushing mouse-wheel is buzz-word compliant in your opinion.
Every day, justify your existence. Every day, beat that same dead horse. Every day, grab your coffee, sound off, and then listen to 20 other people bark at the empty air under their nose to show their devotion to a product that has the slimmest utility, and is coated in slippery, greasy dark patterns intended to screw the users that UX/UI supposedly cares so much about.