So, I figure all modern corporate offices are exactly the same then. There is some good stuff in there, but it is so over the top and forced that it sort of ruin the benefits imo.

Positivity is great, even if it is forced a little, but hiding all negativity, issues and criticism make forced positivity completely useless. Not to mention that at the office I worked there was virtually always one or many of your "bosses" in earshot, in every situation. There wasn't a daily, a meeting or a workstation in that job where some guy responsible for my promotions and employment wasn't listening. This is how you make sure nothing of value is ever said in your dailies and retro meeting. It's all great!

Now let's play the game of figuring the smallest politically correct nitpick to mention during the retro so that we can check that self-improvement/self-organizing checkbox in front of the boss. What, you think over 10 hours of useless scrum meeting is wasteful, on top of the actual important meetings? Well, better not mention it. I mean you could, but shitting on scrum will get you canned. Do you think the way points/hours/complexity is evaluated completely miss the mark? Or are you tempted to mention Goodhart's law when reviewing whatever metric in Jira? Well, better not do that, because you might as well say that your boss's job needs not to exist. Better not mention anything that might compromise someone else in front of the boss, or anything that could be used against you in a review.

Because that's the thing, since no one ever admit to mistake and make themselves vulnerable, if you're the only one to do it it's gonna raise "red flags" and you're gonna hear about it in your next review. Better give a good not-so-anonymous review to your immediate managers too, raising any sort of issues could prevent one, or both of you from getting promoted with increased pay.

Retro meetings are useful but I think some people do them wrong.

First off, who remembers shit from a week or two ago? We started a document at the start of the sprint so we could add stuff throughout the sprint as it happened. Made it easy to remember and actually talk about stuff.

Secondly, retro meetings should typically get shorter the longer you're on a team. You use the meetings to find out what works for you and then most of the rest of the time it's a short meeting unless there are issues to talk about.

And no one should be forced to participate. After a while there usually isn't anything in particular to comment on.

So, a brand new team might have a lot to talk about for the first couple of retros because they do things slightly differently (how they go about determining risks, how people pick up peer reviews, etc) but after identifying those problem areas in the retros it should be pretty smooth sailing.

I know every now and then I have to reiterate to my team that they need to prioritize peer reviews. You can't let 5-8 stack up just because you don't want to do them or whatever other reason they have. Thankfully I finally have someone on my team who gets just as annoyed with them as I do so I don't have to always be the broken record.