More meetings vs more time to do the job

So there's this thing that bothers me since quite few years.

On one side – engineers just want to do the job an go home. The better they do it (e.g. cleaner code, more automation) the more time they suppose to have for themselves. They want to be paid for job done, instead of time spent.

On the other side, there's "management" (I lack good name here, thus it is in quotes) point of view, where there are meetings for everything, and almost all decisions has to be done "collaboratively". Ultimately this results that engineers spend more time weekly on meetings than doing the job. (E.g. engineers discussing with product owner, manager and designer the ultimate layout of a view/screen and later discussing importance of agile, later discussing company goals, and later discussing TDD and later discussing company business updates etc).

So question is – are this additional meetings really helpful from startegic point of view, culture building? Or should engineers be protected from excessive meetings (max 4 meetings weekly + short standups) and then left to do the job?