This is my initial thought on SAFe as well. I am part of a customer's team who use SAFe (very nicely I might say) and it's a monstrosity, created to sell agile™ to enterprises. It's a top down management process to control the development process, enforces estimations, timelines, team boundaries and removes a lot of the autonomy teams might have. In some sense it's WATER-SCRUM-FALL.

That takes away the Agile from SAFe.