One of the reasons Agile (with a big A) is so successful is that its peddlers have convinced everyone that there are only two options: Agile and waterfall. When you're up against a strawman, it's easy to win. But it's absolutely a false dichotomy.

There's a quote in the article that I like:

> Find me an actual tech company that talks much about Agile, and I will be astounded.

In my experience, people at tech companies (at least the FAANGs) rarely talk about Agile, although they do talk about things like continuous integration/testing/deployment. They do not obsess over methodologies for how to move post-it notes around a whiteboard (Scrum vs Kanban) or agonize over how to word a user story narrative, or other parts of Agile Theatre.

People at some non-tech companies, especially those supposedly going through a "digital transformation", seem to have fully bought in to the crap that Certified Agile consultants are selling though.

So a superior alternative to both Agile and waterfall is what's in use at a lot of the big tech companies. For example, the engineering culture at Google, which relies on design docs and a very good set of developer tools and infrastructure. It's not perfect, but it's far, far superior to Agile.

And before anyone makes the argument that those non-tech companies are not doing "real Agile", but Google is, let's be linguistic descriptivists and accept that Googlers don't call their methodology "Agile", whereas the Scrum consultants at big corporates do.