I have mixed feelings on meetings. Most operators do, whether they admit it or not.
The case against them
Meetings can be spectacular timewasters. Some people talk just to talk, filling the hour because the calendar block exists, not because there is anything left to decide. Some people want everyone in the room to share their feelings on a subject that does not actually require a feelings discussion. Affiliative leadership, the style built around empathy and group harmony, has its place. Not every meeting is that moment, and treating every meeting like it is turns a fifteen-minute decision into an hour of process.
The worst version is the meeting that exists only because it existed last week. Nobody set out to make it pointless. It just kept its slot on the calendar long after the reason for it changed, and now everyone shows up out of habit, half-prepared, to restate what a two-line message would have covered.
The case against too few
Here is the part most people get backward: having fewer meetings is actually worse than having too many. Cut the cadence too far and people check out. They stop feeling watched, and once nobody feels watched, some percentage of any team starts deciding they can avoid doing the actual job. Not because they are bad people. Because unmonitored work is optional work, for most people, most of the time. A meeting is not just a place decisions get made. It is proof someone is paying attention.
What actually replaces a meeting
Emails and text messages do not replace meetings. They are fine for status and confirmation, weak for anything that needs real back and forth, and worse for anything that needs someone to actually commit to a decision out loud, in front of another person. One-on-one calls can replace a meeting, but only when the matter genuinely belongs to one person. The moment more than one person's judgment is actually needed, you are back to needing the room, even if the room is three people on a call instead of ten.
The right cadence depends on the work
There is no single correct meeting frequency. There is a correct frequency for a given kind of work, and most people apply the wrong one because they default to whatever the calendar has always done.
Lower touch work holds up fine at once a month. Nothing about it changes fast enough to justify more, and meeting more often than the work actually moves just manufactures conversation to fill the slot.
Higher touch work needs once or twice a week. Anything with real dependencies, real risk, or a fast-moving situation degrades quickly if you stretch the gap past that.
Salespeople need daily check-ins. The work changes every day, the pipeline moves every day, and a rep who goes a week without a real touchpoint has usually already drifted. Most other professionals need far less than that, and treating them like a sales team just trains them to perform activity instead of doing the actual work.
Redesign it, don't just adjust the count
I have seen both versions of this go wrong on the same kind of team: a cadence a person could not sustain, and a team nobody was checking on at all. The fix is never simply more meetings or fewer. It is matching the format and the frequency to what the work, and the person doing it, can actually carry. One version of that redesign is on the record here.