That's what QA engineering is for. They are integrated into the dev team and they pull double duty with QA and code review.

For real. All the stuff that person complained about is something a manager should be handling. Mine do. It's very rare for requirements to change for things I'm working on. There's typically going to be some small changes, e.g. wording of a message or moving things around in the UI, that happen but that's to be expected and one of the better parts of working in agile. You make something and find it doesn't work as well as you hoped? Tweak it.

I think the only time things can change drastically is when I'm working on a priority event, AKA something really bad happened for a customer and we've got to fix it ASAP. There's no time to do in depth research beforehand. You just dive in and sometimes you think it's one thing but it's really something else or it's just more involved than you thought.

I guess every job I've ever had has been toxic then. Juniors and to some degree mid-levels don't usually have any say in things like when to meet

Hehe, no hate here - I likewise was spinning off of what you said, carrying it forward:-) (bc those are quite important matters indeed!)

Direct co-workers usually ask, it's mostly higher-ups that do it. I guess they think that they're important enough to do it. I absolutely ignore it if I don't have time or are on break.

I actually tried a daily slack bot instead. The team HATED it with a passion. And the amount of productivity lost on other teams to a backend engineer blocking a systems designer being blocked by a UX flow etc is insanely large. We have never missed a deadline, hit all our revenue targets, and get much. much larger features done in 2/3rds of the time of the next nearest team. Part of that is because we've made sure to reinforce the concept that we are a single team instead of a group of server engineers, backened engineers, frontend engineers, system designers, [removed to protect identity] designers, econ specialists, UX designers, UI artists, and QA working in their own bubble.

I really don’t understand how a 5-10 minute meeting can get in the way of progress

I mean it really depends on the team. My role is as much translator as anything else. I have:

Infrastructure/Server

Backend

Frontend

Designers (three different kinds)

Performance/Econ specialists

QA

Hearing "Oh I didn't know that, yeah we need to sync" is a common occurrence and on a team of nearly 20 people we never take more than 15mins. We have shared deadlines, shared goals, and work on shared user stories. Having that moment in the morning to go "okay, am I blocking anyone without realising it?" or "I gotta remember to make sure design knows the spreadsheet won't have the thing they were expecting today, it'll be Tuesday instead" is well worth the time.

On top of that, with WFH it's a really good way to cement the team aspect. I wouldn't care so much if we were in the office, but all being remote means we lose the "human" behind the screen a lot.

As I said, different teams and different projects need different things, but I'd argue the reason my team is the number one performing in the entire company is, in part, due to this morning time to get that alignment.