Meetings:
People who can write clear, unambiguous, accurate technical documentation are relatively rare.
And a meeting is in fact sometimes the best way of coordination. We have a question. We have five different people with relevant input into the question. Even if all five can write well (and will do so in a timely manner), we still need to reach a consensus on what the right answer is, and to make sure that everyone's issues are heard, and that they feel that they have been heard. A meeting often does that better than shooting emails back and forth among the five people.
Processes:
Processes are often added because something went wrong (often expensively wrong), and a process was created to make sure that it won't go wrong again. But what they miss is that the process also has a cost - a dollar cost, and a time cost.
Worse, there's a limit to how many processes most people can remember. You can create a process, that's the 47th process that your people have to remember, and when they don't keep it because they don't remember it, you can blame them. So here I kind of agree with you.
> Many processes and bureaucracy are simply demanded by the legislature when you work in some heavily regulated industry. These legal demands often don't make sense.
Maybe they don't. Ignore legal requirements at your own peril, though - they can have some pretty nasty teeth.