I am not very sure that's true. Most good managers I know kept meetings to a minimum and kept them short. Yes they did consider meetings to be "work", but they did try to minimize the duratin and frequency of their meetings.
The best manager I know considers meetings a necessary evil (and so minimize them). He ran a whole division on a weekly 1 hour all hands meeting (plus lots of emails and so on but those are not as disruptive). Any smaller meetings had a twenty minute timer ticking down, with everyone standing up, and decisions were made fast.
He once told me that every managers job was to make himself redundant as and that his (conception of his) job was to make sure he moved things to a state where the system would flow well in his absence, by setting up expectations of how conflicts would be resolved etc, and so he would have to interfere only in the very rare cases.
He brought back the division from chaos and I would often see him sit (he sat "on the floor", not in his office) working on crosswords and so on, apparently doing nothing, but he had a finger on the pulse of what was going on and interfered minimally and effectively, obstacles being removed before they manifested. The organization ran like silk. He was the best boss I worked for and his subordinates loved him. He got promoted and was replaced by a less capable manager and soon enough we were drowning in meetings and no work got done