The question IMO is not whether it's easier or harder, but whether it's more or less sustainable. That in itself is two questions:
(1) Is it sustainable in the sense that you can remain productive throughout one day?
(2) Is is sustainable in the sense that you can keep doing it day after day?
I would say the answer to (1) is generally yes. Meetings usually require continuous partial attention rather than intense focus, involve multiple people, and often have built-in breaks. All of those help to prevent the problem of an exhausted lone programmer getting stuck in the weeds for hours before they realize - usually as soon as they take a break - that they've been looking in entirely the wrong direction.
The answer to (2) depends more on the person. For a true introvert, meetings all day will be incredibly draining, and even a conference lasting a few days can be intolerable without careful energy management. For an extrovert, such a schedule can be energizing and almost infinitely sustainable.
The key here is that for certain combinations of people and tasks a schedule like that is sustainable. However, that doesn't mean it's reasonable to expect programmers can do their job at that pace sustainably. Productivity will drop and/or they'll burn out. What irks me about these conversations is that people with personalities or situations that are amenable to one kind of work schedule are looking down their noses at people with completely different personalities or situations that make it a poor fit. I don't mean that as a criticism of you specifically, but others taking the same position or making the same points have displayed an appalling lack of empathy.