Meetings by themselves are worthless. Similar to how having an idea for something isn't intrinsically valuable. I argue, meetings can't be actual contributions because the real state, the code/hardware/etc, of your project hasn't change. The result of the meeting, what people actually do afterwards due to what was discussed, is all that matters. In which case, it isn't the meeting that was the contribution, it was the artifacts that were created afterwards (documents, jira project tasks, code, etc) that are the contribution.

When we view meetings as actual contribution, we're really just valuing people doing effectively nothing. For example, anyone who's job is just to take meetings, and nothing else, is worthless IMO. You need to tangibly create something afterwards. This is a problem with big tech (which the company I work for is one of), it rewards people shuffling papers around, especially senior+ engineers, instead of valuing real work they should be doing.

Senior+ engineers have also deluded themselves into thinking that they shouldn't be coding, and rather their real work is creating endless amount of superfluous documents and creating as many cross team meetings as possible, rather than doing the hard work of creating an actual product.