You can use PowerPoint (or Google Slides, etc) to make:
* Make visuals for your talk (in person, or over zoom); your talk is the main thing, and the backing visuals are there to focus people on what you're saying. Those kinds of slides often have a single sentence, image, chart, or code block. Importantly, those slides carry no meaning/story by themselves - you can't look at that deck without the talk itself.
* Handouts, or material to send over email, etc., in which the slides themselves are a thing (you might not be there to talk about them, or you can expand some of it as a follow-up). Slides are tightly packed with information, which needs to be carefully organized. They're usually bottom-line up-front (google BLUF), with on-slide info organized in pyramid fashion (google MBB slide structure).
(Edit to add: people often want to reuse the same slide deck for both uses, compromise on it, and end up with the worst combination. Nobody wants to do things twice over).
Diametrically apart, optimized for different things; if you're skilled at making those, can be super-useful. Trouble is, it's a skill that very few people are tought how to do. We expect people to be able to create and deliver a presentation without teaching them how to do it.
So what most non-experts end up doing, is what's in the linked book excerpt:
* pick a template you like
* add a bunch of bullet points where each bullet point is a paragraph of text
* fumble about with creating a chart that's only obvious to you (visualisation is a different skill in itself!)
* read the slides, slowly, while having your backs turned to the audience
Yeah, that's torture.
But it's not caused by powerpoint, same like spam is not caused by email. It's not because slides are inherently a worse format than articles or books (different, yes, and not for the same thing). It's just that people legit don't know better.