"Scrum acknowledges that the more rules you have, the fewer people will think and act independently."

I would argue that Scrum's rules are too many. The best teams I have been on did not work the way that Scrum's rules prescribe, so those rules would have prevented those "best" teams from functioning.

I completely agree with your core point in this article Sjoerd. I wish more people would write about this core point: that people need agency in how they work: if you give them a process to follow, they _stop_ self-managing. Giving them a process and saying "self-manage" are opposites.

But even the Scrum dictate of self-manage is wrong. First of all, they misuse the word "manage" - a word that has some very well-defined meanings in management science. But putting that aside, self-management is not a starting point for a new team - it is an endpoint - an aspiration. What a team needs is the right kinds of leadership, and the right organizational culture. If you have those things, then over time the team can become self-managing. But you don't take a new team and say "self-manage". That is just very bad advice from Scrum, and is a prescription for problems. Better advice would have explained the many kinds of issues that come up in a team of people and how how to manage those, and - over time - raise the self-management ability of the team.

The problem with so many articles is that they start with the premise - the axiom - that Scrum is good. That flawed initial axiom undermines even the best writing - such as this article. There are fantastic viewpoints in this article, if only they were not hobbled by the Scrum-is-good axiom. But perhaps saying that Scrum is good is a requisite for publishing in the Serious Scrum blog - the main PR arm of the Scrum community.