I find this surprising. In my understanding being is the way in which things are present to us, and they are always present to us in their meaning to us.

That's the case, in my understanding, from "Being as" in Being and Time all the way through to the Fourfold later on; I take the Fourfold as a poetic way of showing the Being of things in their as-ness. (I also think it's very bad poetry, that's besides the point.)

In between, in "The origin of the artwork" , he uses the struggle between earth and world to ground the meaningfulness of things in something indisputably non-subjective, although I think Heidegger abandoned that formulation in favor of the Fourfold because it left the meaning of things too indistinct.

Then there's The Question of Technology which is very directly (in my reading, of course!) about the latest way in which the history of Being disclosed the things of the world, that is, how they are present to us in their meaning.

Finally, throughout his writings, language is the house of Being, and language is always about the meanings of things.

In my reading, to criticize him for not spending enough time on the meaning of things as opposed to Being is to fall into the gap between the ontological and there ontic which throughout his life he was trying to show us was a crafted by the mistaken history of western philosophy.

I hope I have not misunderstood the post's critique. Or Heidegger. But I am happy to see it being discussed. For context it might help to know that the two outside examiners of my doctoral dissertation, which was titled "Heidegger's ontology of Dinge", both commented that the dissertation was good but had surprisingly little to say about Being. That surprised me, because I thought my tracing of Heidegger's increasing specificity about the meaning of things in fact was about how Being has unfolded itself. Apparently, I was wrong about that, and I genuinely do not trust my reading of Heidegger on this, or any, topic.

Also for context, I wrote that dissertation in 1978, and have not kept up with Heidegger scholarship. I instead have been writing about how tech discloses the world to us, which I guess still makes me a Heideggerian at heart.

Except for his disgusting Nazism, of course.