I agree with some of what you say, a lot of big meanings could be compressed to emails. But I think you are really simplifying a lot. "1-1s": If they are used

I agree with some of what you say, a lot of big meanings could be compressed to emails. But I think you are really simplifying a lot. "1-1s": If they are used to micromanage they aren't 1-1s anymore. There are a lot of politics in a medium to large sized software org that can be difficult to manage. How do you get ahold of a person in another team you rely on but isn't responding? How to juggle contradictory requests. How to get better in some area? How to prioritize/manage time? The answers to these can be hard to intuit, especially for a new team member and might need to be discussed as issues pop up and can be very context specific. Staffing: When resources are clearly defined and a person is working on one project for a clearly defined amount of time it is simple. But often times there are new hires, people leave, someone might be switched projects, projects might get delayed, etc. There are actual trade-offs to consider here. They probably don't require a weekly meeting, but you are doing a lot of hand-waving. People managing - People can manage themselves for things that they are incentivized to do (normal project work for example), but if it is unclear what the priority is or if something is necessary, they won't do it. Many times there were "team initiatives" to improve code quality or testing and they never went anywhere because there wasn't appropriate time allocated to do it and there were project priorities. Same with asking people on other teams to do something for integration or to fix a blocking bug, often times they wouldn't respond or delay many times and it would be necessary to talk to management. I feel like a lot of your points are assuming everything is constant and things are running perfectly. But in any software organization things are constantly changing