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Doesn't this suffer from similar issues to a pie chart?

e.g. https://scc.ms.unimelb.edu.au/resources/data-visualisation-a...

I'm kinda suspicious that any data visualization that uses a circle is going to be hard to draw meaning from.

Yes and no. When trying to show quantitative data in terms of areas or angles, then you are spot-on: same issues. But these plots, or chord diagrams more generally, are often used to show relationships (like translocations, inversions or duplications in genomes) in context of other landmarks. This use is common and less troublesome. A real problem with Circos plots is that it's so tempting to keep adding additional tracks of "information" that plots get ridiculous. It becomes like staring at the Voynich manuscript: uninterpretable but so compellingly pretty it must mean something.

Are pie charts bad or just misused?

They aren’t good at measuring small quantities. But it is easy to see 1/4 or 1/2 of a circle. And it is easy to see if something is a straight line, 90 degree, or a little more or less than either of those.

Compared to a bar graph, it seems a little easier to spot that one quantity is, like, half of another. And it is easier to visually sum of a collection of quantities, on a bar graph this is a major pain (unless it is stacked of course but that’s another type of graph).

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