Exactly - in my experience, it seems like many managers often have a notion of engineers' work being done somewhere/sometime else, isolated in another dimension

Exactly - in my experience, it seems like many managers often have a notion of engineers' work being done somewhere/sometime else, isolated in another dimension from the meetings, and hence meetings not having much effect on that "actual work". Once you start adding tickets for every meeting and ad-hoc call, and from that it becomes obvious that these are now taking 70% of your time and what little remains is not nearly enough for the "real work", you'll find how the attitude shifts and those managers start protecting your time... Interestingly, managers often don't seem to consider meetings "real work" for engineers, but it's almost the only type of work they do, and take credit for...