90% of the time, the manager is just reproducing what they think they're supposed to be doing regardless of whether it helps anything.

See: the fact that 90% of the time these meetings will not have an agenda.

Most people in corporate have no fucking idea what they are doing and a good setup will have these meetings focus everyone on the same thing and making sure they are progressing. This setup may not be useful for coding untestable and undocumented code in your basement, but it's very useful in big companies. Unfortunately there are also many twats that abuse this in order to make themselves look useful so it's very easy to end up in a broken system if no one is keeping an eye out for this.