It's strange that you had such a strong reaction to a common way of working. I've said it before but I'm huge fan of pairing. It helps my moral through tedious bits of work, it helps me catch defects before they're committed and it means I don't have to go through the tedious back and forth of a PR review.

It could very well be that it's just a personality thing but I genuinely really enjoy working collaboratively in this manner. It gets code out quicker too!

I've worked in places that ignore agile. The ones that don't are much more enjoyable to work for. Can't say I'm an agile pro or anything but certainly the concepts of short feedback loops and producing incremental value at regular intervals makes a lot of sense to me. I can be sure I'm on the right track and not wasting time on things that are no longer wanted / needed

I think the "kids" are just more adept at pivoting to meet the ever changing needs of the market. Who knows, maybe that's where the name "agile" came from? I work in mobile dev and interestingly, the market is often "kids". Turns out it's useful to be able to keep up.

I've worked in both environments. I've seen how the dinosaurs work. Investing time, energy & money into products that are redundant by completion, producing no value along the way. Unfortunately software is a fast paced, ever evolving environment (and it's getting faster!)