I recently interviewed some PhDs, postdocs, and professors for whom powerpoint was used as a tool for thought as well.
I'd caution you to draw conclusions about academics! One reason we did not actually write the software was because we found academics to be high variance in their preferences.
The few people who used powerpoint for thinking would rather write out 20-30 citations by hand before touching Zotero. Someone else had a setup where one click would send articles from Chrome -> Zotero -> bib export -> Emacs org-mode + org-ref + org-roam