you dont have to be in a $MEGACORP to have tons of useless meetings. You just have to move to a company where the people are proud to do SCRUM by the book, with reviews and retrospective (each one 4 hours long)
Hoping this is hyperbole, but if your reviews or retrospectives are actually four hours long, you should politely point out that these do not need to be more than an hour (and many mature scrum teams do both in an hour total)
Interesting. It usually takes us most of an hour to get through our reviews, and I don't feel like we have an unusually high number of deliverables (10-15 tickets on average maybe, representing 1 or 2 larger projects and a small batch of regressions/spikes/featurelets, for a 3-dev team). Retros are taking around an hour, faster than last year by 2x but the time still feels like it's well-spent.
Why ... so you can be labelled a malcontent, non-team player, denied promotions and eventually managed out of the org at first opportunity? :)
There is a way to give this feedback that is positive, collaborative, and highlights what a great team player you are -- the sort of thing that gets people promotions. But YMMV!
it's unfortunately not a hyperbole. It takes us literally 4 hours. Mostly the scrum master do it as a monologue. We all just zoom out and do other stuff. Last sprint i finished a lib that i was working on and deployed our code twice in production to avoid dying live on teams.