Well, the cost is presently invisible. Even if they were good, the meetings would mostly still happen regardless, and there's no punishment to leading a bad mee

Well, the cost is presently invisible. Even if they were good, the meetings would mostly still happen regardless, and there's no punishment to leading a bad meeting, and if you're doing most of the talking, you won't have time to be bored anyway. Often it seems presenters/organizers are oblivious in this way to the fact that their meetings suck. I guess it's the same reason presenters don't stop to ponder why their demonstrations and powerpoint slideshows suck and aren't anything like apple keynotes, and go straight on to just cram a bunch of tiny text on there and read straight off the slide like an idiot, or show excel spreadsheets, or console outputs in lieu of really presenting. I think many people don't spend a lot of time trying to do metacognition and trying empathetic thought to see how things may be received, or thinking about what people actually want to see.