They could review PRs and commits and specs to get visibility and reduce comms overhead, if they had the skills and time.
The non-technical manager also takes great conveniences in making technical people spend their time translating things. But no one ever asks the manager to learn new skills as much as they make developers do it.
Otherwise yeah there’s really no point.
If the Scrum Master or whatever their title schedules any other repeating process meetings, fire them.
literally everything else is work off the kanban board or backlog.
in my teams everyone was told to decline all meetings unless it explicitly led to the completion of a weekly planned story/task. this way all meetings for the team have a clear agenda and end in mind.
for mandatory external meetings & running interference with external parties, there are ways to insulate the majority of the team from that.
On my second team, the visibility theater took over, upper management set and reset and reset and reset our direction, and nobody was happy. In retrospect, I should have said no immediately. Trusting and empowering your people is hard to beat.
That's why the most effective teams are wolf packs - roughly 6-10 highly performant members where communication overhead is still low enough that it barely matters, but have enough people to be way more productive than an individual.
Obviously there's a minimum level of competence you need to have for this to work. The smaller the team the less freeloaders are tolerated.
You want to break a team of 10 in half if you can. Not always easy. But if you can manage it, do it.