If you are in a great organization that works well together, is productive, open, etc, then you can probably make scrum work well.
If you're in a bad org, where communication is poor, talent is too diverse, and you're following leadership instead of users: scrum can feel a lot like what OP suggests.
Context switching, engineers 1-deep in critical systems, having to pay attention to everyone else's BS during the many ceremonies: scrum can feel a lot like what OP describes.
I'm not sure how common the latter is, but I suspect it's more common than your experience with scrum and your organization.
I have also seen some delusional engineers that love to talk about their great work and welcome all the ceremony and chances to 'lead by example' while leaving their entire teams behind: unable to catch up and help with workload. The delusional person thinks scrum is amazing and the rest are grinding through ceremony.
What strikes me is that then I've always been in good organisations, never in a bad one, and the article author seems to not realise that good organisations exist, or have any notion of what makes them good.
I've been in one where the daily standup lasted anything from five to thirty minutes, unpredictably, with the blockers being the chief source of variation. Another that stuck fairly closely to⦠let's say 12 minutes. But none where people didn't learn from experience. None where people would tolerate shit like standups long enough to zone out, or calling such a thing scrum.
