Standups can be traced back to the Scrum practice Daily Scrum. The Daily Scrum is a short (max 15 minute) synchronisation meeting for developers. It is explicitly not a status meeting for PMs. It eventually became known as a standup because people figured out that it was easier to keep the meeting short when you were not sitting down.

Scrum became popular, but it didn’t really make room for traditional project managers. So what to do with all the PMs? Teach them to be Scrum Masters.

This is where things started to go downhill. Most PMs just kept doing what they had always done, just using different names.

And so standups became hour long status meetings, inspect and adapt, sustainable pace and other good things were replaced with micromanagement and death marches. Dark Scrum was born.

This is of course greatly simplified. Agile Consultants and certification peddlers are also to blame.

I agree, regular communication within a team is healthy, but the way stand ups tend to manifest themselves is a meeting every single day where people feel compelled to share a status update. It would be rare for an individual to be blocked every single day, and thus this becomes a wasteful ceremony of going through the motions of giving status updates.

If team communication is healthy, there really isn't a need of daily stand ups. Individual team members will know when to escalate being blocked, and loop in the right people at the right time. If you are inheriting a dysfunctional team, daily stand ups can be a way to get the team back on track. For new members of the team, having a mentor to do frequent, even twice daily check ins, can be helpful on getting them up to speed.

But for high performance teams who have been operating together for years, daily stand ups are often a waste of time, and a needless addition to the calendar.

And then you describe some of the healthiest standup culture I've seen...