- Meeting organizers actively used the scheduling assistant to determine the best time and room for a meeting
- Meeting organizers picked whatever time and/or location was most convenient for them and whoever made it made it
- Meeting organizers picked whatever time and/or location was most convenient then threw a fit if you declined due to another commitment
If you're a junior dev and your lead schedules a meeting for 11am you'd be hard pressed to tell them to pound sand because that's your programming time. Seniors have more leeway but I'm sure seniors at Facebook or Microsoft still probably aren't declining meetings with their boss because it's programming time.
As we see in this case, it started with one team. A junior dev can't unilaterally change the schedule, but they can certainly point out the problem, see if others are feeling the pain of too many meetings, and propose an experiment to improve productivity. And then if a whole teams says, "Manager, we are eager to be more productive, so we are trying X," it's going to be pretty hard for a manager to say, "No, productivity isn't important here."
I am moving teams at the end of the month and I look forward to suggesting this to my new manager, perhaps just a day or two to start and review the VCS after a few weeks to see how much more gets done on those day(s). I just think it would be very easy for a manager, especially a non-technical one, to disregard this entirely.