I think context is really important. The design of the stand up was meant to be a light touch checkin at regular intervals just to make sure we're staying aligned and people aren't getting stuck on stuff. So criticisms like

>Focuses on activity, not outcomes

Isn't really valid, because the standup isn't where you discuss outcomes, that's a separate thing that alredy happened, we've already decided the activities you're doing and how they align to outcomes. We don't need to rehash that daily.

>Doesn’t reveal any information about when that work will be completed

Again, there's a separate process for that.

I think it's a fair point that if you're doing standups, and you're not doing them as part of a broader agile framework then yes - maybe you do need to think about what role the standup fills and therefore what questions to ask. But if you're actually trying to follow something like Scrum then those questions are not stand up questions, there's a separate process for that.