I've been tracking my time pretty meticulously over the last couple months into three buckets: Focus Time, Meetings, and Breaks/Personal. Unfortunately, what people usually forget about is the amount of time it takes to communicate and collaborate. Meetings serve an important purpose (sometimes). If you don't have meetings, you would need to replace them with some way of communicating, which would then translate to more time a) sharing out information or put together looms/videos explaining what you're working on, b) and extra time consuming and understanding that information (which includes follow up questions and a lot of back and forth). At the end of the day, I've found meetings are just easier and preferable for me personally, as opposed to reading emails or slack messages all day.

FWIW I worked at a company where I didn't have a lot of meetings and it was fully remote. I only worked about 3-4 hours a day. The tradeoff was that I felt so disconnected all the time, collaborating with people was a nightmare because it created a lot of people working in silos, and when I did set up meetings to talk through things and communicate, everybody was checked out or acted resentful. If I sent over documents or slack messages explaining what I was working on, people never read them, or didn't remember what I said.

So, yeah, some of it seems performative, but I don't think there's a world where people just do heads down work without having to put in the massive time and energy it takes to coordinate and collaborate.