Why use bar chart with error whiskers instead of box plot? Bar charts with error whiskers, like the one below (taken from What type of plot is it?), seem to be quite common in some communities.

I wonder, however, why is a bar chart used, and not a box plot? For pure values without uncertainties (i.e., when we wouldn't use the whiskers) I can see that bar charts are cleaner and easier to comprehend. But, box plots offer much more information about data spread, uncertainties, etc.
So, is there a good reason speaking in favour of bar charts with whiskers?

Personally, I have never encountered a good use case for bar plots and think it's mostly inertia in some fields that leads to their continued use.

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*If you like Tufte's ideas about data-ink ratios, it's clear that they take up far too much plot area to convey quite little information. All the information in the bar can be communicated with a point.

*One-sided error bars also don't offer much leeway for communicating asymmetric errors/confidence intervals. Two-way error bars are less clear because of overlap with the bar itself.

*Since the information is contained in the height, you need to be especially careful about the starting value and the scale for the Y-axis. I'd say that starting at zero and linear scales are generally more important for easy and intuitive interpretation of barplots than alternatives such as dot charts.

There's probably one feature that supporters would claim makes them superior, which is the ability to use shading/texture in the bar to distinguish between categories. I don't think this is a particularly strong point, but it's the only defence I can think of.
That said, in many circumstances, they are not actively harmful and non-statisticians seem to find them visually appealing, so they tend to persist.
I would add that though boxplots communicate more information, they also have weaknesses and can sometimes mislead. If you're summarising just a few data points, it's better to just plot the raw data, possibly with some jittering or transparency. Other options include histograms, violin plots, and dot charts/beeswarm plots.
