I was looking at steve's YouTube channel and there was a Honduran "MRE" which was similar to what you described: random off the shelf food with a long shelf life.

Same, what they give out to scouts and tiny units is essentially trekking food now. It used to be things like add water pasta or canned soup. Slight step down in my mind.

In Chechnya, the rebels have long used Snickers bars as their on-the-go food - apart from its good nutritious qualities as a trail bar, it's also easy to get in any convenience store, and doing so isn't suspicious (or wasn't until it became prevalent, anyway).

MREs self-heat. Hot food is good for morale and in a disaster situation, instant noodles might be "noodle crackers".

MRE's are self-sufficient packets (almost - you need water) that you can hand out to people who have no other supplies or tools or equipment or perhaps shelter after a disaster and they'll be able to feed themselves a hot meal. Like, if there's a dozen starving people, then throwing a MRE box and a water canister out of a truck (the original article includes a photo of such distribution - https://archive.md/lu4zn/eafd5ec61f35e3afe34d6f7eab59c6ee12e...) and driving away to the next location is sufficient logistics, which is why it works for quick military resupply.

Dried beans and canned vegetables are great if you have a kitchen - you need a stove, you need a pot, you need a can opener, you need a bowl and a spoon/fork. MREs have everything included and will work even if you have a bunch of people who have run out of a burning house naked. It's a very niche advantage, of course, but a niche that may be relevant in disasters.

Also, if you do have a stove and vegetables and a dozen people, they have to stay together or return to get fed; but you can hand out MREs and each can go on their own separate ways immediately afterwards. Again, a specific niche for unusual circumstances, but both military and disasters can have events where this helps a lot.

Depends on what kind of disaster you're prepping for. In a severe disaster, you may not have power/gas for cooking, may not have much access to clean water, and may not be able to leave your home or have assistance come to you if roads are out. MREs don't require any water to prepare the main entrees, don't require any cooking, and have shelf lives of at least 5 years from the packing date (longer if stored at low temperature), and are meant to be easily transportable if you do have to evacuate in a hurry.

That being said, MREs are kind of overkill. The US military also uses called first-strike rations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Strike_Ration) each of which are half the weight of the 3 MREs they replace and that are mostly centered around stabilized sandwiches and wraps. The manufacturer of those sandwiches, Bridgford, also sells to the civilian market: https://www.bridgford.com/readytoeat/ If you don't mind the much more limited menu (it's a disaster after all), a case of those sandwiches will keep a person fed for a couple weeks for much less than the cost and space of MREs.

Not great. Aside from higher cost, MREs are heavy (because they contain their own water), and their shelf life is a couple of years. Freeze-dried canned food beats them for most prepping applications.

The point of MREs is to have a high-calorie hot meal that can be thrown into a backpack, and then prepared and eaten in the field with minimal fuss - i.e. no need to make a fire or mess around with utensils. But even the military doesn't rely on them as soldiers' primary source of food except when necessary.

My MREs are only to get me from point A of Seattle turned into an unnavigable pit of sludge post earthquake to point B somewhere that FEMA can get shit into.

If I didn't live somewhere where half the city isn't going to dissolve and/or get tidal waved, then I probably wouldn't have MREs. I didn't have any when I lived in the Midwest. Blizzards and tornadoes, not actually much travel needs to be done in case of a natural disaster.

They're contained enough that I can transport them along with water and water filtering/iodine.

I should note that depending on the distance I need to travel, I have even more contained dense rations which are basically, as far as I can tell, solid cardboard consistency... food stuffs. MREs weigh a bit more, so if I'm going farther, I wouldn't take too many.

For almost all other emergency I'm instead relying on staying put and eating stuff that sucks less.