This is often something agile coaches see, when working at companies that have a history. Technology teams can easily adapt the agile mindset, working iteratively and maintaining a continuous pace, while every level above has an industrial mindset. Even now I'm as a consultant at a company where this is happening. I've also talked to some agile coaches there, who agree that management seems to own an industrial mindset and that mindset tells them to protect their asses with every move, otherwise they will be held accountable for failures.

Agile doesn't break companies. I think you have a very wrong title for this post. Agile doesn't promote measuring success through various metrics. That's often where DevOps comes in. Tech teams can easily adapt to the agile mindset, but it's rather difficult for the levels above. What I read here was that your company execute agile rather poorly. Nowadays, I often recommend a DevOps culture, that enables agility. DevOps principles encourage cross collaboration, continuous learning, continuous development, kaizen etc. With that teams also adapt to accept failure and learn from it. That knowledge will be shared. There should be no blame and teams should also focus on creating a psychological safe space to work.

Often the management above thinks this is unacceptable, because they have a mindset where failure is bad and someone will be to blame. That mindset is very difficult to change and I've seen some agile coaches say that the only way they can do this is to chip away that one portion of the company to a smaller one, because they noticed middle managers fighting them every step of their process to enable agility at a big company. That's why agility often stops at the team level.