A major French bank where I'm currently working at has implemented this method for its development teams... While we do have deadlines there is so few pressure compared to the other teams I had worked with before, that we actually have the luxury to build our features and being actually satisfied with what we're delivering

Last place I worked tried to do SAFe (I think? They kept repeating it and had all the branding on the presentations). To me it seemed like the idea was to replace a dedicated project manager (or team of them) with a week-long meetingfest every 8 weeks where all the different teams tried to self-organize based on what the business' objectives were.

Apart from the colossal waste of time of those week-long "PI-planning" meetings, it was OK I guess...

SAFe seems to be a pyramid scheme to get you to pay for the latest SAFe badge its overly complex and seems to be there to make management feel better about itself

I misread your comment and thought you wrote "best of both worlds" and embarked on a rebuttal! One of the places I am working at is now ditching SAFe, because they have recognised the issues. The process as implemented there both burns vast amounts of time and is widely ignored. OUTSTANDING!

For a taste of SAFe, here's a 2018 GDC talk about Bungie using SAFe and "big room planning" to develop Destiny 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndPyhgorOKY

SAFe works just fine when Agile is perfected, i.e. about 5 years after every day practicing of Agile. If you have no Agile to begin with, then you cannot scale it.

Even the name is hillarous. It's like one of those cryptocurrencies that try to be sellable by a pump&dumpy name, like SafeMoon, haha.