Staring does something interesting. It does slowly reduce brain waves, but it is harder to hit theta with eyes open. And it works very differently initially. With eyes closed meditation where we, say, follow the breath we use the salience network to slowly chill the DMN for a bit. When you stare at a wall the salience network is what deactivates letting the DMN rip to try and figure what predictions are useful. But it runs out of steam and slowly the state converges with a traditional meditative state. With one important difference: your visual field is still active. Traditional meditation lets you hit theta brain waves. Eyes open is harder to hit theta with but you can definitely hit alpha waves.

So I agree it is meditation, but its quality and mechanism is interesting and different by a bit. It does make me wonder. When we traditionally meditate we grow the salience network (physically). Wall staring trains the brain to simply not seek attention in the first place. Wall staring doesn't strengthen the Salience Network's ability to act as a manager. It recalibrates the Salience Network's threshold for alarm. It trains the dACC to stop firing when nothing is happening.

So both are useful. And provide different neural wiring and myelination.