This sounds soul-crushing and I hope never to work in such an environment.
It isn't.
Soul-crushing is doing "Agile" where the "scrum master" tells you how long each ticket will take, where the client is invisible and never involved, and where retro is 1 hour at the end of the sprint and focused on blame.
But I would feel disengaged if everything was broken down to 1 point stories at the beginning of the sprint.
For me I'd feel more engaged by seeing that I've contributed to completing distinct points on the board at the end of the sprint.
I'm a team of one and only recently started coding a large project. Sometimes I can work entire days only having achieved intangible progress. I'd love to be able to quantify this work as progress toward distinct tasks. Maybe I need to implement an Agile-like system for myself.
I see that you have a task to implement validation in the phone number field, can we break that down into three tasks? Determining the format which needs to be applied and edge cases, adding validation to the field on the client side, and also on the server side?
Right away, thinking about it this way may reveal certain unknowns which you had not previously thought about. And all of it took an extra minute or two. While your team-mates are also engaged and "THERE" to help.
Later you can see which of the tasks took longer or less than expected, and use this to improve your future estimates (during the retro.)
This is only skimming the top of the types of benefits you can gain from a good Agile process.
It was a special place to work.
The time spent in those retrospectives and planning sessions are about the technical aspects - how talks should be broken down, how overall design of interacting components should look like. It's 100% actual work.
I'd take these over another bs "status sync" any day.
I'm getting ill just thinking about this. Two whole days wasted every sprint!
If those two days out of every two weeks are critical to a team hitting their deadlines, then the team is already fucked. If you can't stop, think, talk, and relax for a moment, then you're already behind or will be behind and you'll probably never catch up without risking burnout of the team and mass quitting.