I've been saying this for years now in the context of sysadmin work and dashboards.
Some people think about graphs in dashboards as pointless frivolity and for show. I've heard/seen people claim: all we need is an indicator: green if OK, else red.
In my opinion, while that is useful, in my position that is often too late.
Always visible that shows whatever is important to my work: disk space, numbers of errors, (mega/giga/tera)bytes in/out pr second/minute/hour, that allows me both to predict and react, often ahead of time and also to easier diagnose, both because I now have an eye into the system but also because I have over time built a feeling for what is normal and not.
The same is true for visualizations and we also have the same enemies, for example misleading scaling and too little/much detail, distracting details and colors that looks way too similar.
It consists of 4 datasets with the same summary statistics, but when plotted look very different. It's much easier to see the patterns in the plots than in the data table.
