For example, many people are sheep who follow consensus —- meetings give an opportunity for them to establish consensus and hence accept and absorb it.
Note I am playing devils advocate here, I hate meetings but I think I get their role now
In the first case, the team became dysfunctional each time it happened after like two months or so. In second case we were unable to make customer happy, because it turned out that a lot of information got lost. And programmers were unable to make good decisions.
Maybe the person you are responding to is not better then everyone. Because meetings are rarely about one way communication. Out is two way and lack of those back and forth and fights costs. And where meetings are about one way information, it a.) puts priority on it like this is more important b.) likely puts away people time to absorbed information. Because prior don't read long emails not just because they are stupid lazy, but because they have other priorities.
There are useless meetings too, but once you kill them all you will find out some of them were necessary.
Maybe it's minor megalomania. IME that's another reason for meetings.