When I was a team lead, I rarely was in meetings. About 60% of my time was coding, the rest was reviewing others' work, giving direct technical guidance to team members, and answering questions from upper management. Typically upper management communicated asynchronously and didn't pull me into meetings on a daily basis.

An organization that has a team lead constantly in meetings is horribly mismanaged; and is looking for a talking head to boost someones' ego.

You have to be in a very functional organization to enjoy life as a tech lead . Otherwise you just end up a manager who knows how to code.

The team lead does have a little authority to go with the responsibility whereas the Senior Developer tends to be given things to be responsible for without any authority to do them. But I agree about endless meetings and very little joy of coding.