I was re-watching Office Space the other day and I noticed something. They complained about TPS reports, the high number of bosses, the lack of motivation but not once they say anything about meetings, which means that the increase number of useless meetings is a recent thing.
Peter is a software developer and as a software developer now you would be in at least a daily standup (if you're lucky, I have two half hours ones per day), sprint planing, retro, multiple status updates, 1:1s, code reviews, knowledge sharing and the weird ones where no one knows why they are there.
And not to mention the never ending stream of Slack and Teams direct messages, mass messages, the channels and the reactions.
I say that in a week I do, and this is a busy week, 1h of actual work. The rest of my time is filled with meetings, mails and messages. It's insane.