I've never seen a huddle exceed 5 minutes. Ever. Even sit-down meetings, in large corps, rarely exceeded half an hour (Fortune 50 type companies).
I find the daily update hugely useful as a quick run-down into the changes in strategy happening, and as a chance to know the focus of what others are doing.
Perhaps I'm just lucky? Industry and location: Banking (UK); Finance and Technology (China).
In my personal experience, standups are practically useless if you have a team that has good communication practices. You know what people are working on from the ticket system, things are shared throughout the day as people work on chat, and if you do need some level of daily status report, having everyone email one in directly to the manager is the most efficient route.
If it acquires a have you done any work at all? vibe, you just fight it off with honesty. A half-hour standup is just insane. A large 'scrum of scrums' standup with dozens of people/teams shouldn't take longer than 15 minutes.
It's easy to sabotage standups in this manner by asking questions of others that you know will cause extended discussions. Especially on topics that have previously been "settled" by fiat.
A stand-up shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes per person, at the most. The thing that seems to help the most with this is to set aside a section of the whiteboard for the "Parking Lot". If the discussion starts getting off-topic or taking too long, the leader says "let's put this in the parking lot for now", makes a note of the topic on the whiteboard, and you move on to the next person. After the main part of the stand-up meeting is done, the Parking Lot is addressed, but only people who want to discuss it (or are needed for such discussion) need to stay.
While it's far from the worst thing to drive developers away, I do agree a standup/scrum meeting every day is stupid, counterproductive, and just plain useless.
For the managers, they should be able to look at your ticketing/project system and know instantly what everyone is working on. Keeping tickets up to date is part of the job and really, it's not that hard.
For the programmers, they are now tasked with figuring out what to say in the standup and how to make sure that they are not perceived as not working when they really are. Programmers who need to know what other people are working on in the team can also look at the ticketing/project system and when they need more information (as in cases where their work depends on someone else), they will ask directly.
I've been to standup meetings in close to a dozen different companies, ranging from the smallest startup to some of the biggest tech companies and never have I ever seen a standup meeting end on time. NEVER. I don't think it actually happens. What I have seen is the meeting go on for half an hour to an hour, boring everyone out of their minds. Sometimes this even involved multiple teams whose work barely intersected at all. The other team's work status was a pure waste of time for anyone not on that team.
Yes, it is absolutely an interrogation. A daily standup shows that the manager doesn't trust his employees. He doesn't trust them to keep the ticketing/project system updated. He doesn't trust them to do work without the threat of being shamed and/or seen as lazy if the work done doesn't sound impressive in a standup. He doesn't trust them to seek help on their own. Basically, a daily standup is the sign of an incompetent manager.
Scrum is for rugby.