Sad thing about middle management
The more experienced you become, the higher your position in the org ladder, the more focused you should be in building the right team and letting them take decisions. But that means you should take only a few high quality decisions in a week instead of trying to add value every hour.
This means your day can be a lot more freer. But you are paranoid about seeing as unnecessary bottleneck. And you have to fill your day. This leads to a lot of useless status update meetings, pre meetings, and pre pre meetings.
There is this constant battle between feeling secure that you have built the right team and can delegate vs imposter syndrome and value add disease.
Hence people complain that there are so many meetings when you work out of office vs WFH.
It is by design: Everyone wants to be seen as value adding.