This "meet the team" practice is definitely the standard, and quite a mistake. Part of a manager's job is knowing whom to hire. The manager should be building a technical team, not a social club. Meanwhile, throwing a candidate to a pack of typical socially unskilled engineers is a disaster; they just look for themselves, so the gene pool is quickly corrupted by the in-breeding and lack of diversity. I started in IT forty years ago. We all just worked together. We called it a "job". We made our friends off the field.