Meetings make the cost of collaboration and uncertainty visible. As disruptive as they are I find them to be the most effective way to explain to less technical stakeholders why something is particularly complex or exactly why we need high degrees of certainty in seemingly unimportant portions of the product spec.

They also drive me crazy since we tend to have many of them with relatively little actionable output, but as others have said what tends to happen in the wake of these is the technical people backchannel our own conversations about what needs doing and the sequencing of what we should build to meet the evolving product vision.

What frustrates me is when I complain about there being many meetings on my calendar I'm told to just decline them, but then I'm effectively ceding authority since the time to voice opposition to a particular plan or task is in whatever meeting I'm declining.

Perhaps all of the above is more prevalent in product-led orgs rather than engineering-led orgs, I'm curious if people on the other side of the spectrum have different anecdotes.