You generalize, but I spoke about my own actual experience. If I talked about the things I read I'd say what you say, but I chose to speak about my personal actual experience.
Since you mention scrum, I was on one project with "mild scrum". It was a very good project with very good people. Other freelancers came from non-IT (but STEM) field, they worked in IT because there was no money in their own field. Even they "knew their shit", in their specialization (an Oracle product) more than me, no need to check on them, they too delivered on time and good enough quality ("good enough" sounds bad until you factor in the usual business pressures, like accumulating ever more technical debt because there wasn't a penny for refactoring, and that project had outgrown its initial spec by orders of magnitude).
Anyway, I only ever read about the horror stories, never been in one myself. The closest may have been a few weeks in an already late project for the German government that I was added to for no other reason then to show the customer that we try. Nobody really incompetent either, the project was doing as well as it could, the actual problem was that in order to get the project my company had to promise more than is possible. You can't blame the government either though, if they don't go for the lowest bidder the newspapers and the public are up in arms about "government waste". Everybody actually seems to act quite sanely individually, much of the insanity is a system outcome. Change would have to come from everybody changing at the same time.
Since you mention scrum, I was on one project with "mild scrum". It was a very good project with very good people. Other freelancers came from non-IT (but STEM) field, they worked in IT because there was no money in their own field. Even they "knew their shit", in their specialization (an Oracle product) more than me, no need to check on them, they too delivered on time and good enough quality ("good enough" sounds bad until you factor in the usual business pressures, like accumulating ever more technical debt because there wasn't a penny for refactoring, and that project had outgrown its initial spec by orders of magnitude).
Anyway, I only ever read about the horror stories, never been in one myself. The closest may have been a few weeks in an already late project for the German government that I was added to for no other reason then to show the customer that we try. Nobody really incompetent either, the project was doing as well as it could, the actual problem was that in order to get the project my company had to promise more than is possible. You can't blame the government either though, if they don't go for the lowest bidder the newspapers and the public are up in arms about "government waste". Everybody actually seems to act quite sanely individually, much of the insanity is a system outcome. Change would have to come from everybody changing at the same time.