I have never read a book in my life. I might as well be illiterate, and most people around me might as well be too. Most libraries are vacant, and bookstores are gone. But all these people are doing fine - we put anything down on paper, and despite its incoherence it seems fine by standards that have stooped for reasons I do not know. I can turn in something that makes absolutely no sense, and an instructor from a decent school will tell me that he enjoyed it. Or an instructor won’t enjoy it, but since most people don’t write anything comprehensible anymore I’ll still be fine. I can cruise through my education and get a job while barely having read much at all. Everyone frequents some variant of flimsy entertainment - cable news, cartoons, social media - so why bother trying to read anything worthwhile anyways if nobody else is? Does reading actually make you more curious, more intelligent, more human?
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Notes -
How did you manage to go through school without even being made to read a book once? What did you learn basic literacy with?
To actually answer the question: something others haven't mentioned is that text is the lowest-cost medium of expression. If you have a good idea, but don't have the time/skills/capital/popularity/marketability to express it in a documentary or a graphical novel or a catchy Youtube video, you will write it down. Thus, reading allows you to reach not only those good ideas who were had by good clip makers, but the rest of good ideas as well.
To illustrate: good books are often written alone, perhaps with an editor or two poring them over as far as I'm aware. In contrast, a good movie today is a crowd of actors, technicians, directors, screenwriters and at least a small boatload of money to pay them all.
As ZorbaTHut mentioned, reading is how you find good shit like Unsong or Pale that's probably not going to hit the screens in the author's lifetime.
Knowing reoccuring ideas and patterns and when to apply them is a part of intelligence in my books.
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