Scrum won out IMO because it's an awesome word and conjures up subliminal images of brute force pushing obstacles out of the way, bringing success to the team. Execs can relate to it without even knowing what it is.
I often wonder if they picked these words because they knew nothing at all about sports, of if there is a coded warning in them...
It’s the same reason why demonstrably value-additive, cost-effective prediction markets are rejected by managers despite evidence in their favor: it removes their ability to create ambiguous Dutch books out of different project deliverables and resort to exploiting subjective psychological biases of superiors to win money & status increases. Anything that holds them accountable to the actual measured result status of a deliverable can’t be tolerated.
Scrum is just the by-product of corporate status-seeking evolutionary war games against in-house scientific thinking.