Maybe get fewer people in the meeting? Push as much discussion as possible out of the meeting so it only involves the people who care? More delegation and indirection?

Managers and leadership should be showing up to more smaller meetings not front line people showing up to fewer longer meetings.

I think a reasonable scheduled meeting budget is averaging 1-1.5 hours per week and that is an upper limit not a target. Unscheduled (as in does not repeat every week at the same time) are something to be avoided for a product development team.

It also comes from time valuation. They value their work at $X and my work at $K where X > K so it's oK to burn my $K value because the $X-$K delta is high enough to justify prioritizing their work needs.

What they never seem to realise is a 2 hour meeting with 10 people means they use two hours of their time and 20 hours of their subordinates, most of which is spent waiting for the other 9 to finish.

Lots of those managers simply don't see the inefficiency since from their point of view it looks OK.

Not to management :(

"Maybe figure out why they take so long or why there are so many and address that."

Cause meetings, especially long meetings, are how management shows that they're on top of something and getting things done.

Totally with you here. I also make it mandatory that everyone coming to a meeting read the offline discussion before hand. When someone shows up and we have to summarize the back history again it is selfishly wasting everyones time. I finally started refusing to do it and will leave and tell the PM to reschedule.