One on one meetings are underrated, especially with tech people and even among them. It is important that managers and tech people build acceptance and try to align their mindsets and share knowledge. But one on ones also leave room for manipulation and favoritism which can tear teams apart.
I agree that many group meetings are boring and badly executed, but a team needs sit at the same table once in a while, even if it is just there to detect conflicts and resolve them one on one. Group meetings suffer greatly from groupthink and dominance of invidiuals. Which is usually badly compensated, if at all. But the failure usually starts with a sloppy agenda and inviting the wrong people. There has been quite some work on that but I usually only see scrum masters randomly doing some of them without serious reflection.
Managers should take care of decisions and tasks that teams or invidials cannot make. Most importantly bring the right people together, get out of the way and cash in the results later. Being the single point of failure is not the solution.