I feel like scrum gives a lot of benefits from the top end of the organization -- it generates predictable results, there's a clear schedule of development, who's working on what. From leadership perspective, it feels clean and productive.

From the bottom, the perspective of devs actually doing the work, it feels more like a cog in a machine more than anything. After running on scrum for a while, it feels like you only matter for completing the tasks set up for you this week, and you start to only focus on that and not anything else in the business.

It's entirely possible that I've simply had bad experiences in companies running scrum, and had good experiences in companies not running scrum -- "correlation not causation".

I feel like in the instances I've been in where scrum was used, it may have been used as a process to fix other issues in the company/business, like the business not growing and needing to hit more aggressive schedules, or poor codebase structures or team structures causing development to be a pain and the company using scrum processes to solve that (translation: speed things up), etc.

I'm currently at an org that doesn't use scrum. We just do daily standups; and with a mature team, everyone knows what they are working on; we don't have a project manager breathing down our necks for status updates every day. Dev work is pleasant because code structures and team structures are good, the company/business is doing well so we're not in constant pressure to aggressively churn out more features more and more quickly. This is a huge contrast with a previous place (similar team size -- 15~20 devs), where the business wasn't going well (relatively flat growth), and leadership wanted more effective ways for the dev/product team to get out more big features more quickly.