Before agile became widespread, when someone said "We have a problem with slow releases" they meant "we schedule each release 18 months out and yet it always ships 6 to 12 months late."

Now that agile practices are widespread in the industry, when someone says "we have a problem with slow releases" they often mean something like "sometimes the time from code change to it being in live in prod is more than a couple of days," or maybe "the CD job sometimes takes more than 20 minutes to push things to production."

The problems you are describing above are problems that can only exist because of agile adoption. (kids today, get off my lawn, etc. etc.)

Your biggest problem is that you have to wait a couple of days to get your PR reviewed? Before agile, replace that with 'you have to wait two weeks for your change to get integrated into the build then another week to get an incomplete bug report from the QA team'.

And what's more, agile introduced the industry to tools for systematically, continuously identifying problems like 'the releases are slow' and letting the development teams themselves change the way they work to eliminate issues like 'we're not getting time to fix broken windows' or 'it takes us too long to review PRs'.

My understanding of 'we're agile' is precisely 'we give teams space to change the way they work to eliminate things that cause them problems'. If someone tells me they reject agility, I would interpret that as them saying 'we don't let you change the way you do things', and 'you will be dependent on other teams who don't share your goals which will slow you down'.

I think we're in violent agreement about what good software development practice looks like. I just can't believe how badly the word 'agile' has been warped to the point where people actively think it creates the very situations it set out to resolve.