Scheduling meetings with friends is very common in the Netherlands as it's seen as an efficient use of everyone's time. I always met two friends on a Thursday for a meal and when I moved away we still video call each week at the same time.
Scheduling absolutely, with calendar/phone in hand and setting a time. My foreign friends in university laughed at this a lot, especially those from Eastern Europe and Greece. They would at most schedule to meet "next weekend" for beers not "Saturday at 15:30" like we Dutchies would write down and then all arrive exactly at or just before 15:30. They often agreed and then showed up an hour late claiming Romanian time :-) we got used to it quickly but still both sides made fun of it.
But I know very few people that set "formal" recurring meetings for just coffee or lunch like the author is suggesting.
Things around some kind of activity like tennis every Tuesday evening, or grandma babysits every Wednesday of course are very common. But not like the author of this post describes purely social things that are set so recurring.
For my friends and I it was a social event at the same time each week and all our partners knew we would be unavailable (with the obvious exceptions like illness, partners included). I used to meet another friend every other Tuesday afterwork too for a beer. My partner used to schedule meeting her friends at the same time so we were both out of the house. Often we met at a scheduled time and went home together. I liked the efficiency of it all.
