Meetings like weekly 1:1s are supposed to be helpful for you as the engineer. They're a safe space for you to complain, and share what sucks about your job, and brag about what's going well. It's like work therapy, but a lot of the things that you complain about can actually become things your manager can fix over time.
Things like help in goal setting might not seem strictly necessary if you're self-driven enough. But doing good work doesn't help your career if nobody notices, and spending your time focused on Doing The Thing is time you're not spending playing a game of politics to make sure upper management is hearing your name all the time. Having a manager to establish a paper trail of what you claim your goals are, and then doing them, makes it easier for everybody above you in the organization to justify giving you a raise/promotion/etc.
I agree that, in a lot of situations, poorly-trained managers do more harm than good. But I promise it's theoretically possible for good managers to provide value!
Not trying to be a jerk here, but they're not meant to be a place just for employee to vent. They want the manager to do something about the problems. This is usually frustrating for both people, as the manager is often not empowered to fix the problem (such senior execs not having their shit together, other teams fighting, and all that usual fun stuff) and the employee gets tired of essentially asking every week for things to change, with no improvement.
Now, I would commend a manager teaching an employee to not see management as an enlightened therapist/advocate/accountability partner, but rather as just another kind of specialist in the organization with certain powers and access channels. Sadly, that seems unlikely in the age of Rands, Ask a Manager, etc.
In other words, the engineers would not notice if the engineering manager was not there (except they’d spend less time in meetings and reporting). And the company wouldn’t notice either — unless the engineers chose to use that extra time productively without being “managed” to.