I attended a programming conference last week.

Everyone used PowerPoint or similar.

The slides mostly had code on, and some occasional light hearted stuff (but not distracting).

Without slides this would have been too fiddly for some presenters, e.g. messing around with a text editor or worse just explaining code with no visual.

However rarely was there a slide where the talker just read off it. I think there was 1 slide I witnessed where that happened.

So +1 for PowerPoint if used correctly.