One of my bosses got that memo - the whole thing is one single giant slide with 12 indicators or so. Their sessions are hell, they make people roll eyes and disengage out of boredom. The message I get is that they either don't really care to interact with us hoi polloi, or are just bypassing their own inadequacy at managing a deck at speed - which is understandable, but at that point why are you even there?

IMHO, if one has 6-9 segregated boxes on the same slide and is going to describe each one, they could have been 6-9 slides with exactly the same content but bigger and more impactful. But people have grown to fear the whitespace (can't help themselves overfilling each slide) and transitions (the dreaded pause and meaningless "let's read the title" which is horribly endemic in the States), so they go for this compromise. The impatient reads the whole slide and tunes out, but is not annoyed at you for keeping him from doing that, so it's considered a win. Still, he's not listening to anything you're saying - you could have as well just sent an email.

(It might well be just a fad. C-levels love fads like your next person. In fact, they often love creating fads, just to watch the monkey dance.)

IMHO, a slide should have the elements you're linking together to make a single point. If the point is "sales are good but margin is bad", you'll need a few graphs in the same slide, for sure. But you need transitions at some point to keep people awake and focused on the train of thought you want them to ride. Even in a TED talk, where you really just want people to look at you and only you, the occasional flash of light from transitions is necessary to keep the senses engaged.