At companies that misuse meetings, most meetings are not optional to attend. Of course you could say "Well just don't go", but some people don't like getting fired over things like this.
> Just decline like a grown-up and get some actual work done
What a condescending way to communicate.
Also it's worth noting that the gripe wasn't about meetings, but about meetings that don't translate well to remote, which I think is a totally different class of problem than attendance and meeting misuse. If those meetings added value when they were in-person, totally skipping them is a big mistake. The "work" so to speak is adapting meetings that added value in person, to continue to add value while done remotely. This obviously isn't just "Use the exact same format, but have it via Zoom", but more thought needs to go into it I think.
Or just the general acceptance that for some people, some things will just never be good unless they're in person.
I was specifically talking about the meetings OP was talking about: The ones that have no value-add and where you have no nuggets to add. You can sleep through them, or otherwise tune out and do other work in the background. Why are people even going to these? If there's really absolutely nothing you can gain or others can gain from you, just don't go. I didn't think this was a controversial view, but the votes say otherwise.
EDIT: Also, who is actually being fired for not being attendee #47 at a meeting that they are not contributing to? If you actually saw this happen, let us know the company to warn us all not to accept offers there, because that seems extraordinarily petty.
edit
To answer your edit: Most (all?) companies would fire an employee that refuses to comply with required company activities (meetings as an excellent example). I don't really think it's petty for a company to not allow every individual employee to decide what required team meetings are right for that individual.
As in, you should communicate with the organizer and give your reason for the meeting not being a good use of your time -- or rather, not a good use of the company's money that is paying for your time to be in the meeting rather than doing something else.
If the meeting really is overly broad, then the organizer probably won't really care; they invited everyone who they thought might need to be involved, and from their standpoint it's better to overinvite than underinvite. If you point out that you're extra, then you're taking the potential work to figure that out off of their hands.
In the best case, they'll reconsider the invite list and/or scope of the meeting. In the worst case, they'll fire you. In which case there's a decent chance that it was actually the best case, but you couldn't recognize it at the time.
But I suspect that it's a lot more common for the outcome to be "uh, ok, thanks for letting me know."
What you're describing is fine, but also not what we're talking about.