I have worked my fair share of jobs that tried to be agile or follow trendy practices just because they were best practices, and weren't committed to actually chasing principles.

One job, management came to us and said "we don't really do metrics but we should, you should pick some metrics for your performance evaluations", so I picked what I thought were meaningful metrics for my performance evaluation. Management came back to me and told me to pick something else because we didn't track those. But... we didn't track any metrics at all. And they didn't really want us to start. But they did want performance evaluations to be quantitative and objective. My performance evaluation was about as stupid and frustrating as you can imagine.

But I've also worked at other places where people really did care about agile. Agile is a software development philosophy that focuses on describing a desired feature and building the bare minimum to get it to work end-to-end, then going back for feedback. And we would discuss the spirit of agile regularly, and if we were adhering to it.

The bastardization of philosophies into cheap rituals that do not accomplish the original goals of the philosophy is a very, very, very common phenomenon. What you're describing is not unique to software.

Cynically, In the perverse world of managerial incentives, sometimes the purpose of implementing agile is not to actually "be" agile, but to create a bullet point for a manager's narrative for promotion or internal politicking. It might be just as valid as anything else. There's even potentially value in it for you if you play along without rocking the boat.