The reality is that as soon as one of your customers has a date as a deadline, everything crystalises behind that into a series of deadlines and hence into waterfall.
No real engineering team exists in a vacuum, so more often than not, all Agile processes degrade into waterfall.
If you're lucky and you live in a pure software world with no 3rd parties imposing deadline dates on you, great.
In my experience, those worlds are few and far between.
Amen, but forget about external influence - if you work in a business that is profitable, you're certain to bump into coworkers outside of technologies that live in a pure deadline-driven world. That's business, and it is not negotiable.
There will always be major events that are locked to fixed dates, like conferences, launches and many things that are impacted by launches (like hiring new teams to be using the new systems that we were supposed to be building). This does not mean this company sucks, or working at this company sucks, it usually means this company is profitable.
"Waterfall" is starting to get twisted into some sort of virtue signaling for folks that like to complain about deadlines.
Managing this tension is what we all need to be good at - there's definitely no silver bullet or perfect methodology to manage this, because it is always evolving.
No real engineering team exists in a vacuum, so more often than not, all Agile processes degrade into waterfall.
If you're lucky and you live in a pure software world with no 3rd parties imposing deadline dates on you, great. In my experience, those worlds are few and far between.