Having witnessed this through a flood of incoming ex-Amazon folks I agree that it brings so much more content and focus on a meeting. It is amazing. The silence, the reading, the staying on topic (apart from tangents that sometimes need to be brought up, but are vulnerable to being just dismissed with the power of The Document) all helps to get the attention and feedback you need.
The thing is though, that while the article mentions briefly challenges with the writing, it does not shine light on the hours and hours or reviews, rewrites and re-reviews when preparing the document. The endless and often times pointless arguments and bad blood between people on how to write a sentence so that it would be "correct" and every word and number counts. Arguments if a given word should be "benefit" or "impact". If the word should be "system" or "solution". It does not feel productive and I am not sure if counting the hours spent would actually add up classical "hours wasted" in a typical 10 person "pointless meeting". And also when usually a piece of writing has some soul of the writer, in these documents they end up being soulless, blank format robotic texts only aiming to convincing the reader to fund your project or sell your idea over others. And that leads to quite an Amazonian culture that is a subject of many different articles.
I just felt there was something omitted by OP. So while it has benefits, it does have a cost associated.
The thing is though, that while the article mentions briefly challenges with the writing, it does not shine light on the hours and hours or reviews, rewrites and re-reviews when preparing the document. The endless and often times pointless arguments and bad blood between people on how to write a sentence so that it would be "correct" and every word and number counts. Arguments if a given word should be "benefit" or "impact". If the word should be "system" or "solution". It does not feel productive and I am not sure if counting the hours spent would actually add up classical "hours wasted" in a typical 10 person "pointless meeting". And also when usually a piece of writing has some soul of the writer, in these documents they end up being soulless, blank format robotic texts only aiming to convincing the reader to fund your project or sell your idea over others. And that leads to quite an Amazonian culture that is a subject of many different articles.
I just felt there was something omitted by OP. So while it has benefits, it does have a cost associated.