Pie charts let you tell percentages at a glance, which is a good thing to be able to tell. If your data is not dividing up a pie, a pie chart might not be the best fit, and if you need to tease out questions like "which is the biggest" given several close numbers, it definitely isn't a good fit. It especially helps when you order the slices in a hostile way - if it was otherwise confusing, just order them clockwise by size instead of going with the (irrelevant in this format) data order.
Any chart format has a set of data for which it's a terrible fit. Different formats have
different information optimized to communicate at a glance, and if you're deliberately using the wrong one, you'll end up with a bad graph; that's not a takedown of the format itself.
Any chart format has a set of data for which it's a terrible fit. Different formats have different information optimized to communicate at a glance, and if you're deliberately using the wrong one, you'll end up with a bad graph; that's not a takedown of the format itself.