"No, it's less effort than that"

If you're asking for estimates from devs at all you're probably pushing waterfall on them.

If you want to be waterfall, that's fine. If you're forced into doing it by your business context, that's also fine. But, you shouldn't be under any illusions about what you're doing. It's a waterfall behavior that will drive waterfall effects.

That's just not true. It _can_ be waterfall, but story points are everywhere in agile development.

Story points are for relative sizing are not estimates. That's why you use story points and not hours or days. They're for re-arranging the priority of stories and deciding which ones to do or not.

> relative sizing are not estimates.

Relative sizing is still an estimate.

> They're for re-arranging the priority of stories and deciding which ones to do or not.

Hard disagree - that's what priority is for. Story points are an _estimate_ for how much we can do in a period.

>Relative sizing is still an estimate.

Not one which would attract any pressure.

If you're doing Scrum, then you might have noticed that the Scrum Guide considers the contents of a sprint to be a "commitment" on the part of the team. That "commitment" is usually built by taking the number of story points delivered last sprint, and bin-packing the same number of story points from the backlog into the next sprint.

If you don't think toxic managers and scrum masters are going to use that "commitment" to death-march the team if it looks like the sprint goal is going to be missed then you have a far more optimistic view of humanity than I do.

> If you don't think toxic managers and scrum masters

If your managers and PM's are toxic you've already lost and no process is going to fix it. The only move is to change your team in that case. If everywhere you look you only see toxic managers though, maybe you're the problem.