Huh? Not even slightly.
I scheduled one-on-ones with my reports generally every week and no later than every other week. No exceptions for me.
My reports could always opt out of them if they chose (maybe they were super busy--maybe nothing needed to be covered), but I could do so only very rarely and I forced myself to reschedule.
It is vitally important to make sure that people reporting to me could get my personal attention even when I was super busy.
While I'm sure some of them "fed me platitudes", they also sometimes jumped up and down about something going wrong that they didn't feel comfortable bringing up in public contexts. That's really important.
Because of those chats, he learned that I was a knowledge sponge and loved trying new things, and as a result he challenged me. I got to implement some really cool middle ware that became the bedrock of the middle office trading systems.
That said, I have had bad managers where the 1:1 is a forced chore. My experience isn’t that 1:1 are bad, but that they will quickly reveal the character of the manager. I do agree that if my manager is not great, it is often best if we interact little and I can go my own way. And yes, I am lucky to have had jobs like that where I can own my path.