That's just it though: the fact that Scrum only works given this perfect "no management" ideal. It might work as a lightweight set of guide-rails in a self-motivated, experienced team which has 100% hands-off trust from management, but I'd argue that in that perfect-unicorn case Scrum is not the key to success but rather the fact that you have a good team and good management. In practice - as you are finding - this combination is very rare. Furthermore I'd argue that in the typical company with typical management, Scrum will lead to even greater micromanagement and overhead, and might actually be worse than, say, some version of ad-hoc Kanban-lite.

> So often it is PM who destroys project.

How true! In my 30 years in the industry, I haven't experienced a single PM who was a net-positive (though I've heard that some are awesome), and some that simply made no positive contribution whatsoever.

I had one program manager who was awesome, even though we certainly didn't need a program manager (~40 person startup) per se. But she realized what was going on and then kept the PM (and everyone else) off my back so I could get the job done.

First and AFAIK only time in that company's history that a software project was delivered on-time.

Of course, after we shipped, it was all "congrats, but now you must do things properly like the rest of the company".

Not sure whether that's "sigh" or "LOL" or ¯\_(ツ)_/¯