voidhorse

Does anyone genuinely like these diagrams or find them legitimately helpful?

I find them way too whimsical (no matter what style the authors choose, they always have a sort of off putting "maximalism" to them) and are too noisy to be of any use whatsoever, and yet they are increasingly being sprinkled everywhere, in business documents, blog posts, you name it. It makes me feel like everyone has collectively decided that business is now more like kindergarten, where we all need cutesy, useless little diagrams to jazz up our product docs or strategy papers to make them palatable, I guess? I remember when the software industry was taken at least semi-seriously (though to be fair, it's always been a little more lax than some other industries)

So what gives, am I missing something? Am I just not reading these right? Do you use these slop diagrams at work? Do you have prompt strategies that increase their utility?