[jpfr]

You need to ask why the organizers of the Meetup are doing it. If they are corporates, of course they will plug their products. That's the sole reason for them to invest their time. With this in mind, one can easily distinguish between good and bad meetups before attending.

This post is not helpful for those who genuinely try to build a community in their domain. Also, a good talk compresses many days of reading and a-ha moments into one hour. It's just a lot of work to prepare a good talk.

Background: I'm one of the organizers of a machine learning meetup in my area. We (organizers) are PhD students, so building a strong and connected ML community in our surrounding is an intrinsic motivation. We decided not to affiliate ourselves with a company. Otherwise our quality control for talks would inevitably be overruled at some point.