Honestly, the twelve principles of the Manifesto are even worse than the main four lines. That said, you make a very important point: I really should mention them in the article, as they add a lot of fuel to the fire. I remember them somewhat, and yet in my haste to publish the 'core points' of the article I should definitely have talked about those more, so I'll add them soon. Thank you for reminding me of that.

Agile largely can be described as "the customer is always right" in longer form.

What I want is project management in which we split projects into small pieces, without a Manifesto guiding us into bad decisions. In other words, Agile without the Manifesto or its principles. Waterfall was supposed to be this way, but without good CI/CD tools, splitting projects into small pieces wasn't possible.