Well when you account for the time spent travelling, the time spent socializing and shmoozing, the boxed lunch hour, etc, that adds up to a whole lot of wasted time on top of what could have easily been a 45 min zoom meeting, or an email. Its fun I guess if you get all your social outlet from your coworkers, but if you get it from anywhere else it probably feels like you just got drafted when you get sent to meet the distributed team in person.

You are missing the point here. Plenty of things can’t be a 45 minutes meeting. Sometime what you incorrectly call schmoozing and I call building a bond is the point and is extremely necessary. People are not machine.