Don't they have even more meeting to go to and documents to write? Things in the physical world require a lot of approvals and consideration before are given a sign-off to proceed to implementation.

Yeah, there are a ton of meeting for those roles as well (possibly more since they have firm hardware prep needs, usually official standards to get approval for, etc.). Reading through the requirements docs and planning years out for a product release being done by the electrical engineers on a new device, made me thankful software was so agile.