If nothing else it's quite hard/uncommon to print out a PowerPoint and read it carefully in a quiet room by yourself, I do this with written stuff all the time.
The whole point of PowerPoint is to pander to people who can't or don't want to sit down and carefully read a report. They want to sit back and passively consume information like they were watching TV. The problem then isn't so much PowerPoint itself, but rather these quasi illiterate people being in decision making positions. That's the real problem, and PowerPoint is just a symptom.
Speaking in a meeting, or delivering a talk in a larger context, often works better with visuals. Delivering information in this way is not "pandering" to people who don't or won't read a detailed paper. They're different contexts with different goals.
Before Powerpoint, having any kind of visual aid to a talk was incredibly onerous. You had to print up transparancies, or literally have SLIDES made, and the whole thing was just an enormous pain in the ass.
The PROBLEM here isn't Powerpoint, or the existence of visuals during a talk. It's that humans are bad at communicating generally, and that the use of slides during a talk is something many folks absolutely do NOT understand or do well.
You've been to a talk where the speaker basically just reads the slides, right? That's pointless. What you want is slides that compliment and amplify what's actually being said, not duplicate it. You also want slides that "scan" well -- if your audience has to pause and read a 150 words on a slide, you've fucked up. (DoD and defense industry presentations are INFAMOUS for this, btw.)
Technical papers convey technical information more effectively than PowerPoint presentations, period. The only edge PowerPoint has comes from managers refusing to read technical papers, making the PowerPoint literally better than nothing.
