Is the lack of "meetings" offset by pair-coding, dragging out synchronous conversations in Slack, or otherwise controlling engineering time and schedule?
No, (currently) fully async as long as deliverables are met. The extent of 'controlled' engineering time is requiring 1x code review from a different SWE to merge a PR which is also async via GitHub comments.
It's still quite rare unfortunately, and there are still negatives: less time in meetings means more time actually working which isn't always what you want!
Though it's offset by very generous comp as there's not as much bloat to soak up your TC. So YMMV...
