It turns out that coordinating people, and getting them to work towards a common goal, is hard. There's all those pesky individual motivations, major life events and crises, and psychological strengths and weaknesses. Add to that a modern work environment in which many of us work on complex systems with many pieces and dependencies, any of which can break down and block forward progress. Plus, like it or not, businesses have hard legal requirements - financial reporting, human resources practices, etc. - to satisfy, along with their usual goal of building products other people (with equally complex motivations and incentives) want enough that they'll pay for them.

A good manager shields individual contributors from as much of this as possible. In other words: the better a manager is at doing their job, the more it looks to ICs like that manager is doing nothing at all - because the ICs experience so little of the behind-the-scenes logistics that they can imagine, to a first approximation, that the business magically runs exclusively on engineering effort. It's sort of a weird spin on the Dunning-Kruger effect, where your worth is inversely proportional to the external perception of that worth (as opposed to internal perception) - which is deepened by the fact that a good manager also takes blame and gives praise.

That's not to say that meetings are good, or even necessary in most cases! They're just one tool for building shared vision, and like any tool they can be (and often are) misused - long, pointless meetings with too many attendees and no agenda. I've been at those meetings. I'll admit to having held a couple of those meetings - though by now I like to think I've learned better; now, I'll always make sure there's a clear agenda with clear desired outcomes, that only truly necessary attendees are invited, and that it's not the sort of thing for which an email or async discussion would be fine. (Plus I invest some of my time in learning how to properly facilitate.)