Meetings tend to be some the least productive activities, especially when everything "discussed" could have been sent out as an email (which can be read remotely).
Meetings can only be replaced with E-mail if people actually read (and respond to) their E-mail, and I've found fellow employees' E-mail hygiene to be pretty spotty.
Depends on the type of meeting. Where I work, we have a short 15-minute meeting every morning that's done over video call, just to see who's working that day and make sure everyone is on the same page. The CEO constantly does screen-share meetings with clients so they can show him what they're trying to do with the product, and he can watch the recording later and break it into tasks to give to us. I'd say it works pretty well. Without this the product would lose out on a lot of valuable feedback.