I couldn't agree more. The second approach is definitely more likely to make the deadline. At the same time, it will often result in disgruntled people who just do the minimum possible to ship. The extra meetings and overhead result in less time for actual dev work, and people will be hesitant to make any improvement they deem would be nice to have, no matter how small, because of all the processes it has to go through.
Of course the way to do it is not to completely let the team go untethered with monthly checkins. You can still monitor progress, at the tech-lead level. But micromanaging the team members has always seemed hugely detrimental to me. In particular, let the team deliver in chunks: a prototype, a major feature, a reduction in bugs. But let them follow their passions in their day-to-day work.
In my experience, plan B gets something done, but you pay for it by shipping half as much and it's half the quality, plus everyone is unhappy. I guess if all you want is to ship something for a deadline go for it.
edit: to be clear, I don't think you should turn the team totally loose. I just think the right level of external micromanagement is at the scale of weeks, rather than the 'hours' I see useless managers doing in practice.