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Meetings are to align people. Complaining about too many of them can be a sign of many different things, but one of the biggest is needing to align with so many people to get anything done.

If you hold the same number of meetings but stop inviting some stakeholders, those stakeholders are going to be upset. If instead you remove some meetings from the process entirely, by e.g. not requiring multiple design reviews for internal products, or by not letting platform teams force everyone else to use their software, or by letting teams spin up their own low capacity services without meeting with ops, or anything else that lowers the complexity of getting work done, then your team will be happy and the previous gatekeepers will be complaining.