The discussion of drawings or no drawings is very like the story of the Blind Men and the Elephant.
It is unlikely that a company would continue to demand drawing production if it was no longer necessary, and suicidal for a company to quit making them in the case where they are necessary.
For companies that have a simple procurement stream, no matter how complex the resulting item, it is possible and even a good idea to remove complex descriptions from drawings and put them into shared documents**. If this is pursued to its logical conclusion, there is no need for a drawing. Molded plastic parts, for example, can be based on a set of agreed-to tolerances and textures can be represented by placing surfaces on named layers with the actual textures described in other documents.
Companies that have complex streams can never give up drawings. Drawings are inspection acceptance documents. If you work in an industry that requires external oversight (customer pays for and requires delivery of drawings) then there has to be documentation of what constitutes an acceptable item. Government and defense contracts almost always require these documents in order to ensure that anyone, even without access to the original models, is able to verify that items they purchase meet the original requirements.
What I find ridiculous about MDB is that at least as much effort is put into creating view orientation-specific notations as is done to put views and locate dimensions on conventional drawings. What makes it ridiculous is that even a tiny drawing has more room for/higher density of information. Crappy resolution on a laser printer is 300dpi. A 4k screen, just coming out, is similar in information capacity as a 14 inch sheet of paper. Working with that info on a screen is like driving a car while looking through a toilet paper tube. And, printed out, quickly applied notes, flipping between multiple sheets, no need for a keyboard, impact resistance, are all things a paper document can handle that no computer screen can offer as an output.
Creating drawings is an output for the purpose of informing others of the requirements for determining whether an item will be useful in the intended use, an output that can require depictions that aren't always supported in the model. They aren't always needed, but in many cases they are indispensable. It would be nice if PTC could see the value in better supporting this highly intertwined product description that is critical to profits for many of their customers.
**This is the value of documents like ASME Y14.5 and the ISO counterparts. Everything in those documents could be in notes and diagrams on drawings, but it simplifies things to have the complexity separate.
. Seriously they need to redo sketcher in drawings same way it works in Creo layout and add some stuff to model sketcher also, like patterning. I always thought they would make Layout something like Acad lite thingy but they seem to just show that they can do this but its "so haaaard!" so they will stop half way. 
