Sure you can. You can send out the problem before the meeting so the developer can think through the issue and make notes before he is put on the spot. You can also help the developer during the meeting by simply making the meeting positive instead of negative.
"You don't always have the luxury of making decisions in the way you'd prefer without paying a cost."
Snap decisions are often bad decisions. If you need to make a very important decision in a hurry it means someone already made a mistake in not considering this issue earlier. That happens, but you need to realize that the resulting decision is highly unlikely to be a good decision, let alone optimal. A mark of a good team is being able to avoid these kind of situations through research and planning.
Again, I'll go back to the same point: if you have created an atmosphere in a meeting that is causing people to freeze up due to high stress, you need to fix your meetings. There is something very wrong.
Sure, you can mitigate this to some extent, but you can't reliably avoid having high-stakes situations which you need a meetings which are inevitably going to be high-stakes to address, or that senior developers won't be to a certain degree on the spot in those meetings.
> The solution of hiring only people who can shout the loudest and brute force their ideas through in combative meetings is not a solution that will create value over the long term.
I haven't been arguing anything like that; particularly, I'll note that there is a big excluded middle between people who tend to freeze up in high-stress situations and "people who can shout the loudest and brute force their ideas through in combative meetings".
> EDIT: You also shouldn't be making snap judgements in a meeting that will affect the future of the company in the market. If there is a lot of tension in the meeting and the outcome is unclear, postpone the issue a short while until people can work out the issues better.
Postponing action can be a decision that will affect the future of the company in the market. You don't always have the luxury of making decisions in the way you'd prefer without paying a cost.