That's where it becomes "impossible to implement"—you can't impose it as a cookie-cutter solution driven and controlled by management, and get much good out of it, yet that's the usual way it manifests in the wild. But that's not so different from anything else management might push in its place.

"Agile" is a very vague and shapeless idea which is hard to design an experiment for; but I would settle for clean experiments with well-defined methodologies/frameworks/strategies/whatever. Specifically, for scrum or kanban. Whenever people talk about these two, they seem to misunderstand them more often than not.

Whatever you do instead, you will also cargo-cult to some degree and fail equally as badly at.

For all the "You're doing it wrong!" I've seen in industry with respect to agile, I've also felt that every team I've been part of that did some version of it, seemed to function OK. I always found the "Agile Manifesto" a completely silly nothing-burger, but always understood the core tenet of 'agile' to be "employ tighter feedback loops", which... is sort of mostly how it plays out in practice??