I have to second that. If you don't get value out of the 1:1 with your boss, and your boss doesn't get value from you during a 1:1, you need a different boss. I always viewed one of the biggest values of 1:1's is that people on my team could educate me about things I was too distracted/busy to notice or keep up with. It's wickedly hard for a technical manager to both manage and to keep up with the technology the team is using. I always tried to use a part of the 1:1 time to play student and learn whatever my team member thought was important for me to know. Likewise, when managing up during my 1:1 with my higher-level manager, I tried to make sure the most exciting new ideas bubbled up.

One of the best way to weed out bad managers once a company reaches a certain scale is a simple two part system: 1) Make it easier to get an internal hiring req than an external one, and oversubscribe the total headcount budget by a few percent purely with internal hiring reqs. (Guarantee hole flow.) 2) Establish an immutable policy that a losing manager can never block a transfer, ever, for more than a couple of weeks of clean-up/hand-off. Bad managers are then easy to spot by the vacuum that surrounds them.

That's hyperbole on both sides, both the "terrified" part (implying an employee shaking in fear before their 1-1) and "disastrously wrong" (a sweeping write-off of this multidimensional thing called "culture").

Simple truth is a lot of people don't like them, they induce stress for a number of reasons (such as employees' natural instinct to want to "look good" in front of their bosses), and bad 1-1s are often just another annoyance at work -- not a disaster, just not too useful.

That may be true, but it doesn't really change anything. Not everyone has the ability to switch jobs on a whim.