I've been with a few companies that waterfall in two-week cadences and call it Agile...

They usually expect a fully working demo

There's no greener grass on the other side. I've been in the big consulting business, and sometimes you can't get a client to schedule a meeting for months, so you're flying blind, with absolutely no feedback. And then we go into the typical cycle of "Lessons Learned" etc, because what you've developed is irrelevant to the client.

And it's December 31st.. Still shocked by how many times I see a year rollover go bad.

Even before the rollover it get's bad. I had a CI failure on 31 December 2018 for code which worked fine on 31 December 2017, because it was the first time for that code to have Dec 31 in week 1 of the next year.

And last year someone else's code failed on 30 December 2019, so I had a pretty good idea where to look.

Still need to fix a bug in code written only yesteryear because the 1st of July wasn't on a Monday this year, but I decided to snooze that test failure ... it'll work fine again in 9 years.

*without being amplified by bots and trolls

I think we're a little passed the merit-based free frontier..