It’s wild to me that people don’t consider meetings work. Does everyone else work at a place where they’re told exactly what to build and they never have to talk to anyone else about what they’re building?
It's wild to me that you don't seem to realize around 75% of meetings could have been a short email. Meetings are where middle management gets to strut their stuff, and by stuff I mean the latest stupid trend stemming from what amounts to a self help book for organizations. Where "people engineers" get to waste everyone's time with "team building". Where productivity goes to die. The meetings that matter and actually contribute to actionable decisions in my experience no one bitches about. That isn't what most meetings are.
It's just a question of proportions. If people organize meetings that are not directly related to my tasks, enforce camera on policy and so on, they are not respecting my time and negatively impacting my productivity. On the other hand, calls with my team about the tasks at hand are extremely useful and can save a lot of typing. And usually they are quite short unless we decide the problem is so hard we need to work on it together, which rarely happens.