I was trained by the originator of scrum. In the training, this was repeatedly stated as one of the main dangers to avoid. What I got out of it is that scrum is a model, and it is up to a team to iteratively figure out how to apply that model to their situation. It gives a team a framework to manage change.

For example, the scrum model talks about a product owner. The cargo cultists insist that this needs to be a single person, with title of Product Owner. Yeech!

The reality is that the product owner could be a single person, or could model an entire organization that is developing requirements. What the scrum team needs is for these requirements to be made known to them in an orderly manner, and enough autonomy to have a reasonable discussion about them (how realistic they are, the cost, etc).

I've seen a lot of cargo cult scrum failures, and I've seen a lot of actual scrum successes. Over time, the cargo cultists have become the majority, though. That is a shame.