I came to the comments page to post something to reiterate that needless meetings are a drain on productivity, but while thinking about that I got a minor epiphany.
I make bespoke industrial automation software, and I've followed dozens of IT projects from the beginning to the end, across a wide variety of companies, from 5-employees shops all the way to megacorps.
I just realized that the projects with the largest number of meetings were generally the ones with the worst communication in practice. They were the ones where you don't know who is supposed to deal with a problem. Or you do, but they won't answer emails, or calls, or anything, unless you go to their boss, who will then call a meeting. Or where someone knows there is a problem, but they won't tell you, or anyone else, and if they happen to miss the right meeting, nobody will know about the problem until deployment time.
Looking back, I start to wonder whether needless meetings are not only a waste of time, but are rather actively harmful on top of that.
The best projects were the ones where there are well-isolated boxes (e.g. automation, network, accounting), and for each box there is one person who is in charge of everything, and communication between boxes is strictly point-to-point. Everyone who finds a problem knows who has to deal with it, goes directly to that person, and the problem gets fixed.
It might well be that I'm reversing cause and effect, and maybe the companies with crap communication are the ones that have to call meetings to try to get shit done. But the correlation at least is fairly strong in my mind.