Yes to not capable of reading, no to "no longer." This is how it's always been.

Bezos talks about how he ran technical meetings at Amazon. He would force the meeting organizer who wanted a technical decision to create a short memo. (I think it was one, or maybe three pages max?) Then the first 10‒15 minutes of the meeting was set aside for everyone to sit around a conference room table with a printed copy of the memo and no devices and physically and carefully read it.

I know, it sounds like kindergarten. And now it's one of the few $1T companies. Because people will not read.

Notice there are several steps here. First, he had to force people to write what they wanted to say in a concise memo that communicated only a base set of knowledge required to have the specific discussion. Note: People pushing for a decision should be forced to record in print what they are asking for and why anyway.

You don't have to include everything, that can be introduced in dialog, but you do have to start everyone from the same place assuming they know nothing about the specifics of the discussion. This step alone forces the meeting organizer to clarify their thoughts. Note: This is something everyone should be doing when they write tech or decision docs anyway.

Attaching the document to the meeting invite guarantees many people won't read it, so the first part of the meeting is dedicated to actually reading it. This means you can just show up, no pressure to do pre-work. Note: You should be able to expect responsible people to do some pre-work (unless you have a track record of wasting everyone's time).

This worked at Amazon because it was the big boss man himself insisting on it, and participating in it. It won't work if you try to graft it into company cultures where there is no strong authority figure people are trying to impress with their obedience.

Even if you diligently do the work yourself, if you go around acting like this is table stakes (it is), you will immediately alienate your coworkers. If someone says something and you point them to a source they were supposed to read and gently let them know what they've said is already addressed, even in cases where they could plausibly have read it and it slipped their mind, they will respond defensively because you are pointing out that they didn't do the work they want everyone in the room to think they did. You may expect everyone else in the room to be on your side, but that is naive. The majority of people in the room is equally insecure, and they'll line up against you as a pedant, superior, know-it-all who's not a team player, and you're being political by trying to make others look bad. (This is every company I've ever been at except one.)

Basically, it's high school. Most people, most of the time, are not focused on problem solving, they're focused on presenting the appearance of problem solving. If these two activities conflict, appearance always wins. As an actual problem solver, your job is to strategically align the two. You can get a long way in this direction simply by literally telling the person publicly that you can see they did the things they want everyone in the room to think they did before correcting them.

Here's what this looks like. Your doc says, "Of course we should never even think about doing X, because X is stupid." You go into a meeting and before you get to that part, someone pipes up and goes, "Obviously we should do X!" The way you are currently working, you'd respond, "After the intro, the first heading in my document in 36 point type says 'Why X is stupid'."

Instead, you should say, "That is actually very insightful, in fact you and I are thinking exactly along the same direction!" Now from here you have a choice, you can do the soft switch or the hard pivot:

• Soft switch: "I initially thought this too"—you didn't—"but it turns out for deep and nuanced reasons only a specific modification of this generally great idea works, but that's down to details." The specific modification here is that any part of this idea is toxic and will blunder billions of dollars, so we need to do the exact opposite of every component of the idea, as your doc explains under the first heading.
• Hard pivot: "I too realized that the direction we need to go is Y," where Y is nothing to do with X. Here you just give them verbal credit for having a great and insightful comment, and then with no explanation you just carry on the meeting as if they'd never spoken. If they're the type of person that insists on being publicly ignorant and you fear they may interrupt with, "Wait, that's not what I'm saying at all," you can preempt this by starting your next few sentences with directly contradictory phrases like, "As Nimrod just pointed out," then go on to "extend" Nimrod's idea that makes no reference and is not based on what was said in any way, shape, or form. Again, if they persist and interrupt anyway, that's when you have to solidify your position by giving them one last escape hatch: "Hang on, maybe I misunderstood, but I think you said we should basically avoid X, right? You're referencing section 1 of the doc?"

You might think you can't get away with just ignoring what someone says and pretending they said the opposite, but if you can quickly clarify a much better alternative and make it seem like that's where they were headed, most people will immediately jump on board. Truthfully, they don't really care about the thing, they just want to be seen as contributing, so pat them on the head and thank them, and keep going. Most people after the meeting will not even be aware of what happened even though it's obvious. (You have to be really good to get away with this in a recorded meeting, though.)

I'm being a bit silly here to make the point, but in truth, this is just how it's always been. The docs you write are not intended to be read, they are a record of your work, they are a durable work product that associates your name with work you did at perf time. That's it. All of the actual information is not going to escape the doc once you've hermetically sealed it into that perf time capsule by writing it down, you need to market it in other ways.

Somewhat cynically, at most companies an approach that works is to get your idea written down, get a few people to review it and start circulating it around, and then when you market it (not in print), attribute the key parts of your idea to a politically powerful figure in the company. You can say things like, "Of course I think the best technical solution is to do X, but so-and-so is hyper fixated on Y, so I had to build it around this." So-and-so will be just as surprised as anyone else when it eventually gets back to them about the idea they had, but as long as it was something "you heard," the rumor can't be attributed to you. Besides, if it's a good idea, so-and-so will definitely take credit for it anyway. Just make sure to only do this for things they don't really care about, don't try to contradict something they actually are focused on.