I have been contracting for the last 10 years and I have a contract like this now. It's great, I've been completing tons of work for the company, but it's not the norm.
I report directly to the CTO of the company and talk to him almost daily. I have no daily standups and almost no meetings. Everything is as needed. IE: If we need to meet with someone in the company. we schedule a short meeting. Everything else is through our main ticketing system.
"pull a respectably specified ticket with clear acceptance criteria, and then pull request myself to at least a modest quality of life"
If you want a better quality of life, choose companies that don't rely on software as their main source of income and have been in business at least 5 years. I usually only choose companies that utilize software, but the main product is not the software itself.
My motive is that I have side businesses that I also run during the day.
Consulting companies are probably the worst in terms of work/life balance. I worked for a consulting company that had hundreds of clients and multiple projects all going on at the same time. The pressure was crazy.
They originally hired me to get a project done in 3 months (down from the original estimate of 1 year). When I started working on it, they told me I had 7 weeks and pushed me every day until it was done. Luckily, I was able to figure out some better ways of completing the required tasks and got it done in time.
As far as pull a "respectably specified ticket" goes, this might be difficult. Most of the time, people don't know exactly what they want and part of your job (unless it's a very large company with a layer in between you) is to decode someone's request and translate it to software. It will almost never be as easy as seeing a ticket with perfect requirements.
But it really does sound like you should be contracting. You won't need to be part of any gatherings or useless meetings, because a company is paying you hourly.