In any team development context you need a way of interrupting people when blocked, so regardless of whether it is slack or skype or something else, you will need some chat-like tool, unless everyone sits in the same office every day. That doesn’t mean that pointless interruptions should be encouraged or even allowed. I’ve always made it a policy of telling people in chat to send me an email if their question was not blocking, but that only works if your manager allows it.

Another aspect here is to what degree these tools are introduced for the right reasons. I’ve seen from the inside (facility services industry) how open plan offices and flex desks are pushed for cost reasons (fewer sq. m. per employee) while being marketed as promoting team interaction (studies show it harms productivity more than helping). Cost is a bad reason, but at least it has an internal logic. But then you get people who see everyone is going to open plan and move to open plan also but with lots of empty space, nullifying the cost advantage and keeping only the downsides. Maybe with slack there’s also a degree of cargo culting going on.