I have to say, everything you wrote sounds great. We'd probably agree on more than we'd disagree. That said...

> But throwing out the idea that daily standups are a good idea because you've been subjected to a bad implementation of them

It's not that I've been subject to "a bad implementation." It's been multiple, across a decade, ever since Scrum became a thing, really. Disaster after disaster.

I'd also add that most of the effective engineering I've seen (aside from the occasional uber-productive solo code artist) had clear priorities, effective intra- and inter-team communication, and certainly a disciplined retrospective process, all without Agile or Scrum. In the best cases it was self-organized, because we wanted to do good things for the sake of doing good things, and management understood we were trying to do the right thing, and got out of our way when we were being effective. When we weren't, it was a conversation, not school-time lockdown. I don't think that environment can be replicated by process or fiat, which is what the formalized Agile/Scrum of today seems to try (leaving aside the more cynical cases).