One way to look at it: did you ever see a place explicitly following the manifesto successfully ?

To me the real message was "think for yourself and do what works best for you", and the organizations that actually do that typically don't need to be given directions and don't follow advice from productivity gurus. Toyota didn't read the Agile Manifesto and come up with their own solution to their own problems.

The people that fell in love with Agile where the most further from it, the message was vague enough that they would seek more concrete frameworks, which inevitably would put them out of the "think for yourself" zone.

I think you hit the nail on the head. It was the same with Extreme Programming before that: If your team is good enough to apply the techniques, they don't need to follow a recipe that's written down. That seems to be the principal problem with this kind of offering: Those who need it, aren't quite capable of applying it right, and it becomes a mockery.

"We were not Agile as such; we were talking about a Waterfall as if it were an Agile flow of water molecules."

Agile processes are agile the same way the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a democracy.

Holy shit, this is the best way to describe it. I mean, just that we have Scrum “ceremonies” should be an indication that it’s the opposite of what it says it is.

And it makes waterfall look nice. Evidently manifesto writing is harder than the author(s) thought it would be.

"Waterfall" is pretty well conceived, to be fair. It only gets a bad rap because people stop reading after the first paragraph.

The following paragraphs, what everyone misses, essentially say "but that is not enough, you also need..."

I agree with you, but I read this as: > No process and tools > No / limited documentation > No RACI or alignment (yay, kumbaya) > No plan or managed dependencies

I'm not saying this is the outcome of an Agile approach, but sure seems common on the Scrum projects I work on.