Foolish to generalize backlog’s as a useless technique because the author has had bad working experience from them.

As the author found, if you tune your backlog processes they can be quite helpful. The only part of agile I use today is the backlog. If you keep engineering details to a minimum (or limited until it reaches the top), items brief and to the point, and have it groomed regularly so it is always bounded to a size it works well.

I find that on multi year projects you can “archive” the bottom 20-50% of tasks and no one will care. So it cleans itself up quite nicely.