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(Please don't hear this as a criticism of your point - I'm just not very experienced with scrum.)

To what extent are sprint points a good measure of productivity or of effort? My understanding is that they're based on estimates, which seem like a moving target to me depending on the experience and motivations of the estimator.

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They are a moving target, but my org has them pretty closely pinned to 2hrs of "work time" per point, at least ideologically. When you see that go from 12-18ish in person per person to 30+ (~38 average consistently for me), it's pretty straightforward that the org is actually getting closer to its billable 80 hours per sprint, even with 3ish daily Zoom meetings. And to boot, the quality of design, PMing, ticket writing, feature scoping, and everything else around it has increased, which probably helps the productivity.

> my org has them pretty closely pinned to 2hrs of "work time" per point

Off-topic, but isn't this exactly what you're not supposed to do with points? AIUI, they're explicitly disconnected from time so that teams can adjust points to match their reality.

Explicitly, yes. Implicitly, no.

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