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Besides quickly transferring files, which is mentioned in the article, one of the most useful things I've done with netcat was when the company's cloud-based IM+email service went down and everyone in the office couldn't send messages to each other despite being in the same network. After some brief in-person discussion we used netcats for IM, and it worked quite well.

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Wouldn't it have been easier to use another cloud-based service such as Slack?

No, because netcat requires no signup, no "support", no "updates", no license, no fees. It is not closed source and there is no third party company such as "Slack" that needs to be involved in private communication. Netcat is a small, fast, open source program that is easy to compile on any UNIX-like OS. Whereas IRC, and presumably Slack, requires at least two programs, a server and a client, netcat requires only one.

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