Agreed agile seeks to learn as quickly as possible, that experience was back in 2015 and the scrum guide has improved since then. However my perspective on agile as a whole advocates (whether explicitly or not) to primarily do learning through building - even if that is building a prototype.

An example of an argument that the team had back then was the agile principle; “working software is the primary measure of progress”. If you take a Design Thinking approach we may spend a week or more doing research and interviewing customers. The agilists brought up the agile principle and were pushing to build something in that time and not just do research. So there we were opposing sides. Now of course an extreme case but I’ve had that conversation a few times over the years - some see a team learning and not building for a sprint or more as “non-agile” - even quoting scrum if you spent the sprint interviewing customers you wouldn’t produce a shippable product increment.

So that’s my observation/ where I’m coming from with that statement. But I don’t really think they’re opposing to me. They both as you say seek to reduce risk and rest your assumptions/hypotheses.

Absolutely agree on your point about transformations failing because of a lack of product focus. Perhaps that’s the driver, the market is pushing back because of that gap.