Daily check-ins don't demand linear progress, do they? I like having frequent checkpoints for brief discussion and visibility, even if they usually pass without a lot of action.

Depends on the team. If the team is strong at async communication, writing good status updates whenever such an update exists, then no, daily meetings where everyone would say "well I'm just going to repeat what I wrote elsewhere" are ipso facto excessive and unnecessary.

But there are definitely teams where members are poor written communicators, and in such cases, there's nearly always something new that comes up in a daily.

I think daily check-ins are valuable as long as everyone knows that "same as yesterday" is a valid answer, and not problematic in and of itself.