In my opinion, it's a matter of mental framework. Presentations are not meant for a reader, they're meant for an audience, and if you try to make them readable, self contained, you're bound to fail. Presentations work best, or only, really, if they accompany a presenter, not the other way around.
For a lot of routine internal corporate stuff, they sort of need to do double duty and the presenter needs to just skip over reading a lot of the fine print. Even if they want to spend the time to create a separate document, most people won't read it.
For a conference presentation, I may create speaker notes or include a link to background material but basically I feel no requirement to try to put everything I may talk about on the page.
My take PowerPoint slides in private industry is that they are mostly analogous to what academics use poster presentations for.
They are narrated to small audiences of 1-10 (maybe 20) people at a time, who might want some notes to read before or share around.
IMO like posters they make for terrible presentations to very large groups and I kept questioning the design and purpose, but it seems to work for certain situations.
I might raise the number a bit (though most of the audience will be tuned out anyway) but absolutely. "Here's our plan for the Kumquat initiative." There are some high level points and a bunch of supporting data and detail which many people these days are used to reading in presentation format.
But I'd never give a presentation like that at a conference.
Client deck is tricky. In my prior stint as an IT industry analyst, I think we usually prepared a report of some sort if we weren't presenting. On the other hand, the client might prefer essentially a slide deck for internal purposes. Probably ask them what they want.
Presentation documents can never do double duty. They will always fail at least one of the goals, and if you insist on not optimizing for one, they will fail both.
Most routing corporate stuff is just people booking the time for denying others the excuse to say they didn't know about it because of time constraints. Those people don't care if the presentation fails to communicate anything (what it almost always does).
Most routine corporate stuff is basically a document in presentation form which a lot of people seem to prefer these days. Yes, you may give a 30 minute "presentation" using the "slides" but it's not really a presentation which I think is fine. I don't really disagree with your basic point. The sort of thing presented at larger team meetings I attended latterly tended to FYI sort of stuff, some of which was vaguely useful to know and some of which wasn't.
Ghaff’s comment already mentioned it but in my current use case (corporate) slides are very much supposed to be self contained. When I was a student I had no issues making pretty slides, but (fortunately?) almost never needed to have more than just some text and pictures in any slide.
