It comes down to trust. There are ways to protect your own integrity and equanimity in a low-trust environment but most people will suffer in that kind of situation.

Before agile you could “kick the can down the road” for six months before the senior people realize what they wouldn’t hear from the new guy on the project: nobody knows how to make a production build! Until then though life can be cozy on a day to day basis. In agile on the other hand, you have nerve-wracking meetings every day but somehow it never gets out that the engineering manager has no idea how long it takes to build the product or that the code violates all the rules [1] laid down by that engineering manager despite that engineering manager asserting that “we do code reviews”

[1] reasonable if not inspired