I don't understand what you are talking about. Obviously we don't sit in silence. Some things are just easier to discuss in a meeting than over 100 Slack messages. Those things we discuss in meetings.
The original context was about meetings intended to let others know there is a problem. A time to allow you to say things aren’t going smoothly. But why would you wait for a meeting to let others know there is a problem?
The only reason is because you feel pressure to ensure the meeting isn’t silence. Otherwise you would have logically made it known long before. What is really gained in withholding information from the team?
But you're right that having a low priority Slack channel that you can casually look at when you're at a natural stopping point is way less disrupting than having to drop everything you are doing because the clock says it is meeting time.
I wonder sometimes if people who get engrossed into this meeting culture have just never experienced better? Anything can seem like a good idea if it is all you know.