> But what it does mean is any company that runs an organized process
That organized process is for deliverables that the company is investing resources into (and managing the costs of). The existence of such a process does not preclude the development of software/products outside of that process.
I've delivered many "skunkwork" projects, some of which have become critical parts of the company, while still delivering on official projects. It's stuff that I've been passionate about, or a personal pain point, or an experiment.
I've even done it as part of official projects, e.g. "we need to deliver A, but that requires B which is really annoying/slow/expensive - I'm going to solve B first and then A will be trivial". No skunks required.
> It would be deeply frowned upon, likely a sacking offence, to create software outside the tightly controlled process.
Nope. The response is "let's adapt this to fit into our process", not "you're fired!". The worse response is usually "we don't want it" or "we already have a project in flight to build that" and you've just wasted a bunch of time.
> Modern organized software development kills innovation.
It sounds like you're recently frustrated about something? Many companies have delivered innovative software through modern, organized software development. Where do you think AWS came from?