My question always is, when I read about Scrum, Why do we need it?

I have been on many teams in my career that were extremely Agile, and in which the process looked nothing like Scrum.

The biggest problem though, is that Scrum puts the focus on the workflow, but that is usually not the problem. Product teams have so much to consider - the obsessive focus on Scrum practices distracts from so many things that have a much, much larger impact.

Here is a common dysfunction: In the retro, the SM tends to steer the discussion toward Scrum issues. As a result, the extremely important technical issues don't get discussed. By the end of the meeting, the team is so anxious to get back to work that the technical issues never get discussed.

Scrum absorbs all of the remaining cognitive capacity of the team, leaving none for CI/CD and other issues.