It's popular because it's a convenient compendium of a bunch of charts.

Let's say I'm wondering about "number of smartphone users growth". A google search might pull one chart for that.[1]

What Mary Meeker does is ask 200 of those types of questions, gathers all the data to make the charts, and puts them together in one deck. That's more convenient than conducting 200 searches on the Statista website.

I think the disconnect and dissatisfaction happens because they expect Mary Meeker's slides to provide some mind-blowing insight. I think it's more realistic just to accept it as a nice data dump of some of the latest trends.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/330695/number-of-smartph...