Developer: “Yesterday was mostly meetings. I wrote some code, but there was backlog grooming sync, then a retro, then another meeting about improving our meeting efficiency.”
Lead: “My friend, one glorious day we will simply do the work instead of talking about it for hours”

How is this an improvement from waterfall development? Meetings should serve a purpose and have a clear outcome or decision. Meeting should have the minimal people needed to avoid disruption. Steve Jobs threw people out of meetings if they weren’t necessary to the decision being made. There should be no meeting if there is no decision.

Scrum is too often poor at timely decision making. Instead of meeting after meeting in which everyone has to be present and people with stronger wills get their way too often; I have found a subset of scrum meetings can, and should, be done by just the people needed with a report out generated for others to remain in sync and give feedback if they were wrong. Example: PO’s exploring feasibility for direction don’t need the whole team there to make estimates. One or two senior folks can give good enough estimates. The whole team doesn’t need to be involved in a component design discussion – leave it to the story owners who then double-check if it doesn’t impact others. Map day shouldn’t be an 8 hour long snooze fest about scoping each story from scratch. If the scoping/design work is done by people interested in those stories before you get there, they can present a single slide on the estimate/work and get any critical feedback. Team leads and the PO can do backlog grooming alone.

Yes, this is a bit of a twist on the scrumm idea that the entire team commits to a delivery – but some decisions can be made by senior/trusted individuals owning the story/architecture.