Why does Agile boil down to constant deadlines?
The goal is to consistently deliver incremental value, to build a culture of continuous iteration / improvement, and to make predictable and reasonable commitments to maintain a sustainable pace of work.
Having to change your two-week plans regularly because you ignored something obvious isn't working incrementally. It's just bad planning.
If you are regularly encountering "unforeseen problems," then the issue is not unforeseen. Whatever the source is needs to be factored into your planning in the short-term, and resolved in the long-term. You are posting on ExperiencedDevs, not csMajors, so things you mentioned like tech debt are your problem as a professional to identify, raise, and successfully advocate for fixes for.
And so that they can put a hard stop on a “project” even though there almost never truly is
As a business you need to decide what level of investment / what quality of product you are aiming for. You cannot just allow things to drag on forever, or you'd constantly be wasting time adding bells and whistles instead of delivering the next big chunk of value for your customers.
Your meeting situation sounds funky, but I'm not grasping how you're simultaneously in hours of meetings every day yet struggling to schedule meetings due to time zone conflicts. People shouldn't attend meetings that aren't relevant to them, but that is all a matter of company culture and completely independent of agile.