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I frequently find the people demanding daily check-ins at my workplace are the ones lacking direction, and can't 'deeply' engage with the work for that reason, usually because their managers also lack direction (poorly defined vision, poorly defined requirements, etc) I wish managers could realize that 'more collaboration' by way of frequent meetings doesn't equal more productivity for the people who are actually doing the work.

For someone inexperienced it's really not. They don't have the intuition to know when it's time to cut your losses and move on from a dead end, and they don't know when to ask someone else for input. A full week without supervision on an open ended problem is likely to get them extremely tangled up in a bad solution.

One status email per week is plenty. I have worked like that for years and been super productive.