I never got on well with Scrum, especially with the way it has become synonymous with “agile”. Really a shame that “agile” which focused on people has been swamped as a term by Scrum which is process process process.
I favor kanban processes - it locks in less at an organizational level and thus allows more freedom to make changes for the team. Though in my experience there is less change needed in the first place because the only processes specified are the ones that are locked in and everything else is whatever it takes to make it work.
Agile is rooted on focusing on people. Make a group of good people and empower them and they will create a process that works well. Also on the cases the process fail, they will change it. But if you go and decide the process, that's more than half the way towards a failure already.
Agile focusing on people is a good thing. People are number one, but agile has always acknowledged the roll of processes.
Ideally, even in a large organization, it should still be structured down into small teams that can self-manage. You'll end up with Conway's Law taking effect, but you'll also alleviate the O(n^2) communication problem. In my experience, it works a lot smoother than 50 person teams where everyone's tripping over each other all the time.
When I was working in a startup, we did a "hybrid wfh" thing: we knew when we were about to have something requiring our full attention and would work one (or multiple) days from home. We had Google chat (or whatever it was called at the time) for anything that could handle a delay in response and the phone for anything that needed a chat right away.
At the time, the office was in a kind of co-working space, so it was a particularly hellish combination of open-space and multiple companies, complete with people unaware of their phones' silent mode. The upside was that even for regular work, productivity skyrocketed when we were home, so the founder, who initially was against this, started warming up to the arrangement.
More broadly, I think that different jobs have different requirements. I hate it when people talk around me and find it harder to focus. I never got used to this even after multiple years. And while I love listening to music, even while working, I don't enjoy wearing headphones all day long. I'm wearing glasses, so bigger headphones start to hurt after a while and in-ears are pain to put back in after every interruption.
Also, headphones cut you off from the surrounding discussion (that's the point, right?) so the whole "you can overhear the spontaneous decisions during the day" kinda falls flat, doesn't it?
This is a good thing if the spontaneous decisions are always and only the ones that are important to you. This is a bad thing if there is any other decision. In a shared multiple companies space the only decision that matters to you is "where should we go for lunch" (they might not work with you, but you can still eat lunch with them). In a company only space it is better, but there are still a lot that don't matter to you. If it is a team only shared space most of the decisions matter to you.
Lowercase agile culture is not hated. What's hated is usually completely wrong implementation of that idea and cargo-cultism.
Even more so, the whole industry of capital-case Agile.
From my experience, in good teams people understand when it's time leave each other alone. I hate the word "sprint" which comes from the much hated "agile" culture, but it's what it is: there are these small sprints when everyone signals DND by taking on their headphones. Which also means only disturb me if it's very, very important or urgent.
But it is also important to be aware of what's going on in the company. Not just what you are doing but also why. Everyone can take part in decision making which happens during the day spontaneously. Or at least be aware of the process. From my observations: if done right, this kind of environments can be super productive.