[sublinear]

> So the thing is, human social relationships demand structure.

This is the part I agree with the most. I'm not sure about the rest.

I can only speak from the perspective of a software engineer. Many meetings, especially daily standups, do not prioritize and filter out user stories and tasks causing them to take way too long. People zone out making the meetings less effective. It's basically weaponized on some projects especially when the management doesn't have a clue what's going on. It enables the blame game e.g. "well why didn't you say something during the meeting?"

It's usually pretty clear what should be discussed, but it's rare to see a project manager who looks at the activity stream on Jira or equivalent. There's usually a huge disconnect between management and dev teams in general, even on a relatively "well run" project where everything goes as planned with minimal friction. Devs wind up picking up a lot of slack and just have their own informal meetings amongst themselves to remedy it.

This is terrible long term. Every project I've ever been on inevitably hits a snag and all this unravels into management going into freak out mode when they realize how big these communication gaps have become.