No, the ISO standards aren't a joke.

But they are only a way to document your routines. So ISO 9001 isn't worth more than the people who spends time analyzing routines and documenting them based on what is important.

If the important steps are documented, and the process can measure the outcome of the process, then you can pick up whatever deviations there are and figure out how to constantly improve your processes.

Because of this, ISO 9001 will always be a waste of time if the people driving the introduction of it, and responsible for the maintainance, don't have the experience to realize that the main criteria for quality is knowledge and experience. And that a ISO 9001 routine will only be a good routine if it is able to document some of that experience in a way that other people can follow a "good path" when doing their work.

You can document how to clean or fill the coffee machine. But it will not much help the company to improve.