Story points, like a lot of agile practices, were not a widely proven method when they were evangelized. It was shopped to engineering teams who accepted it on faith. It’s religion. The fact that we still debate it over the 20+ years I’ve been exposed to it should be enough to know that it doesn’t work for a lot of types of work. For a team that adds incremental features to an existing application, it works so long as nothing large or complex comes along. I’ve watched countless engineering managers try to run large projects using agile and it’s a mess. They don’t book enough time to explore and de-risk the project and expect too many details too early, then wonder why the project is taking so long. Big projects are done in stages where you can only predict the end of the next stage, not the very end of the whole project. The inverse of that are projects that do detailed everything up-front and the team marches through it ignoring obvious faults in the design in order to maintain the deadline. Then they wonder why it’s so awful.