They could easily do the same thing ahead of the meeting, and you'd have much shorter meetings.

To highlight two ways to go about this, we can assign homework, or assign, for lack of a better word, meetingwork. We don't always know how much free time our colleagues have outside of the time we've scheduled for a meeting. At least by enforcing meetingwork org-wide, it is ensured that everyone has at least some time to read the docs and they're fresh in their mind, even on short notice.

You're right about "reading speed", but I think the common alternatives are no one knows how prepared anyone is vs a few people might not be fully prepared.