If anything the article really undersells it by calling the meetings "useless". I'm a programmer, but most of my experience over the past 12 years has been client-facing, and these things often go beyond simply wasting time to actively harming your project. Much like the idle engineers who they invent work for in the article, idle meeting minutes get filled with planning that completely ignores actual business needs.
You make a meeting 20 minutes, everyone shares their progress and can plan their week. You make that meeting an hour, and 20 more minutes are spent investigating someone's "concern" over an imaginary problem, and the next 20 finding solutions to this imaginary problem. Because that's the end of the meeting, mentally this becomes everyone's priority afterwards, and the day that would've been spent continuing on a healthy project is now wasted solving something that doesn't need a solution.
You make a meeting 20 minutes, everyone shares their progress and can plan their week. You make that meeting an hour, and 20 more minutes are spent investigating someone's "concern" over an imaginary problem, and the next 20 finding solutions to this imaginary problem. Because that's the end of the meeting, mentally this becomes everyone's priority afterwards, and the day that would've been spent continuing on a healthy project is now wasted solving something that doesn't need a solution.