when they do. i was part of an 'agile' team in 2019 (6 mo contract). I wasn't there long enough to have strong views on work items or priorities, but did watch the interactions between others. It was a decently organized team inside a (fast) growing org - lots of challenges there. But overall, there was a decent balance.
Worked on another smaller team longer - 2 years. As the company grew, it got far more process heavy. The 'sprint' stuff was "as tech lead, you get 5 points to use however you want per sprint!" (yay?). that got taken over by the CTO getting involved and using those '5 points' for constant infrastructure stuff. I was reviewing code I delivered, and it was full of cut corners to continually hit deadlines. I begged on a few occasions for more 'cleanup' time. It was always denied (except for 3 days over xmas, because... literally no one else was working, so they couldn't say no).
The project transformed in to "here's our strategic goals for 2022" with every quarter mapped and filled to the brim with work. 0 time for anything but bare minimum MVP. The thinking was "well... you've been able to work at that pace before, and we added someone new, so we can increase that". In 2019, it was MVP - test the idea. Speed to market makes some sense. In 2022, millions of dollars and hundreds of lives affected each month... we need to take a bit more time to clean up existing code, retire legacy code, adopt a slower pace to focus on clarity, testability, even performance concerns etc. This seemed to fall on deaf ears.
"discretion to the teams" tends to ring hollow to me based on recent experiences, and ideally I'll work with another group in the future with a healthier balance.