Exactly. The rolls aren't necessarily meaningless per se, they're just meaningless to them. I'm one of those "build the world as you go" types, at least to some extent. I mean yes, I'll likely have a map, I'll know what the country is like, I'll know why they're there, I'll know what season of the year it is, etc... but there are all kinds of specific little details that get made up and filled in as you go along. If you roll random for those, you'll always need more die rolls. Let the players make them, don't tell them what they're rolling for.
A party of 6 is riding through the woods. The GM has all of them roll "a percentile." Half a dozen d100s give the GM the particulars on the small village they have just come upon.
A PC comes to a small stream, fills his waterskin, allows his horse to drink, looks around.... rolls Perception, fails it miserably. Suddenly the GM includes a fossilized dinosaur footprint on the stream bank that wasn't there before. The PC spends the rest of the day on the lookout for imaginary wyverns.
The height and weight, eye and hair color of the traveling merchant you pass on the road, the reliability of the rock upon which "the clifftop road" you are currently traveling is built, the flood stage of the river at the bottom... little details are what gives the setting depth and make it feel real. "I can't think of all those little details, I'll spend 300 hours doing prep for each 6 hours playing the game!" Of course you can't, that's the point. Let the ongoing chaos of players' dice rolls furnish the details of the scenery as you go. By getting the players to roll them without knowing what they are rolling for (more than in very general terms), most of the die rolls they make become "chaff" for tactical purposes.
"Okay what was that series of rolls you had us make a while back?"
"That was the basics of that dwarf merchant you came across right after."
"Is that all? I had a 95 in those rolls!"
"Yeah I know, that's why you met a dwarf who was only 3 inches shorter than you."