1. People don't read their E-mails promptly or
2. It COULD be done over E-mail, but it would take 10X the time because the topic requires synchronous back-and-forth discussion, which is not efficient over E-mail.
I've seen E-mail chains that lasted WEEKS, where a 45-minute meeting would have been enough to resolve the problem.
Second sure the discussion part could have been dealt with in a 45 minute meeting but how long did the thinking part take? Perhaps someone tested a few theories before presenting what they thought was the best approach in a short email. You aren't going to do that in a meeting you either end up taking the path of least resistance or you end up in another meeting after everyone has had a chance to go think and try stuff out.
Not true. There is an overhead to loading the relevant context into your brain each time you approach the issue.
Looking at an issue 10 times over the course of a month is typically going to take much longer "person time" than blocking out the time to look through an issue all at once.
Use IM, a chat room, whatever. Just use something that is persistent and can actually be referenced afterwards.
Then there's the fact that nobody ever records the audio of in-person meetings, and almost never actually takes minutes or notes of what was decided, so the only record of it is the progressively hazy memories of the participants. So then you have another meeting next week to rehash the shit you just went over.
Showing up late can happen in chat rooms.
Taking it off the rails into a tangent can happen in chat rooms.
Not ensuring accurate minutes are recorded is a failure of whoever is conducting the meeting, and should never happen.
I have a huge preference for technical solutions that do the right thing by default, rather than trying to get people to do their jobs right. Most people are aggressively mediocre and don't seem to have any impulse to do their jobs in the most efficient way. So I can either get on their ass and chaff them along all the time to do things right, or you can use tools that make doing the right thing easier than not doing the right thing.