I don't disagree with you at all, except for the "Agile" bit - I assume you mean "agile" as in "fast and well split up", but it's hard to tell what you meant by it.

That's more or less what I mean by the kind of "waterfall" that existed before the actual Waterfall was around - that sort of give it a manager and let it run on its own sort of thing.

To be fair, that took many forms - often not resembling what people think of as strict Waterfall much - but it still, largely, follows the basic structure of project management in any industry in which design comes before testing, etc.

One thing that's very interesting about your article is that I feel like compilers are something of an exception to the rule; you can't exactly ship half a compiler and the consequences of a design or code mistake are astronomical, making an Agile release cycle a bit of a misnomer there, yet making testing frequently of such high importance (due to the cost of incorrect design or testing) that it was feasible even then to do it due to the penalty of not doing so. I can certainly see why a more "Agile-like" approach would be more sensible in that situation, even without CI/CD tools available and so forth.

That said, I absolutely agree that no "framework" is required. I do not mean to suggest in my article that we should adopt some new framework named "modern Waterfall", but rather that such a framework is so simple that it does not even need a name.