I think where this breaks down is when you have someone whose only job is to be a scrum master. By definition that person has to be sliced into many teams in order to make up a full time job, but then all that person does is run short meetings and move tickets around.

When Agile first started the scrum master role was filled by someone else on the team, a tech or business lead or sometimes it was round robin and everyone took a turn. The premise for this was, if you have a team of people that never talk to one another they can get off track and not be aware of what other people are doing, you can have duplicated work, or someone could be blocked by someone else, or someone could add a feature that everyone else is not aware of. Candidly, software developers tend to be introverts and do not usually willingly talk to other people or attend meetings and usually just want to be heads down in whatever problem they're working on and you can get a situation where everyone is in their own rabbit hole. So Agile added a single 15 minute meeting every day where people could quickly check in and stay on track.

This was also at a time before Slack and Teams and other real-time communication was commonplace, so the main two ways you interacted with your team were a meeting or email. The meeting was way more real-time and so was a good way to communicate.

However this has since devolved into standups that take an hour instead of 15 minutes and actually become status meetings, non-technical people running them who collect metrics they have to report up to leadership, a process that becomes heavier and heavier and starts to look like the waterfall that existed before Agile, etc.