Chat allows to broadcast questions which is invaluable in information economy.
And just, you know, talk to coworkers.
And just, you know, talk to coworkers.
It's almost the same with email, people have never been trained and still send file over and over, don't communicate with the whole team, you need to push and ask the information because it's a nice tool but not correctly used.
It's not like that at most Software Engineering places and knowedge transmission via common chat is invaluable.
The only interruptions I get from Slack are when someone mentions my name. I subscribe to a number of Slack channels, but only see activity there when I'm looking for it. (Except for a production problem channel, where I get a notification for all activity in the channel.)
When I have time to check Slack, I can catch up on unread messages, I don't have to read them all in real-time.
If it's important, they can message me directly, or use the #prod-problems channel where an "@all" mention will alert me.