I've been in companies that do this. I like it more than alternatives.

The default for most meetings everywhere I've seen is to present information during the meeting, verbally or in powerpoint. For example, standups often devolve to people sharing their updates. This is much worse than having people write down updates and taking a few minutes to read them at the beginning.

Also note that these documents usually take about 5 minutes to read, even for slow readers. Meetings with much longer documents are pretty rare in my experience - feedback on long documents is usually done separately.

It would theoretically be better for people to read the documents ahead of time. But the benefit is pretty small IMO, and the cost is large – it fails if even a single person hasn't read the document.