Monk mains pls respond

So I'm trying out monk and in PotD (Really enjoy it though I do wish they didn't remove positionals because it takes away some level of skill and job identity) but my main gripe is with meditation.

What's the extended function of this other than just charging up your gauge, and what are your opinions on it, in the sense that is it a waste or a benefit.

Personally I'm finding it annoying but do try to live with it still, though the weirdness is very apparent. Am I missing sth here that I will know once I max Monk or are the same opinions resonated too.

It´s actually a great tool for really short downtimes (~1s) or really long downtimes (when a boss disappears). You can optimize your DPS very well with it and it´s definately a befenit to have it. A bunch of other classes will lose DPS at some downtimes meanwhile MNK is still able to do something. Together with a well-placed Six-Sided-Star, MNK might be even the class, which makes the most use out of downtimes.

But as long as you´re able to use 123456 without any uptime-loss, you shouldn´t use it. (Maybe in the last second before a boss disappears, when you´ve already 4 stacks. To unleash it and immediately gaining 5 points back in the downtime could be a damage increase too. But this would be an over 9000 play.

Thank you so much, was searching in the mean time in case nobody responded but it makes sense now it's for downtime, which I completely overlooked.

You hit it before you enter combat so you always have a full chakra gauge. You hit it during phase transitions or long flashy attacks and other things where you've got no adds to kill and nothing else to do so you can get a full chakra gauge. Since it's on GCD, you probably don't want to hit it in combat too much unless your target is invincible or reflecting or something like that and you really want to hit a button.

When your Chakra gauge is full it turns into a powerful attack. It's a pretty good attack. If you're fighting trash you probably want to use the AOE variant instead though.