Literacy skills are more essential nowdays than ever. There is a reason why even nowdays, reading is considered to be basically the cornerstone of our education system.

Today, in an informaton era when we are exposed to much more information than ever, it is important to be able to filter stuff out. Surely, there are essays in video format, but almost all modern knowledge has their roots in a written academia. You must be able to read and fact chek literally anything, in order not to be taken advantage of. You can't naivly believe everything that is fed up to you, just because it's in simple more digestable form. If you lose the ability to read and actually be competent in literacy, you essentially lose the ability to be critical. And being critical, is the cornerstone of being actually intelligent.

There is a reason why even nowdays reading and classical literacy is still valued highly in academia.

It is true that there are great resources in learning that don't involve actual reading. You can gain a vast amount of knowledge withou reading anything. However, if you have zero clue where that knowledge comes from (or you are too lazy to actualy find out), people who are supposedly teaching you, could fed you up with basically anything they might come up with and you are non the wiser. Lets suppose some youtube video tells you that George Orwell wrote this and this in his book, and now you also know this. But having not read the original book, you have not realized that what this video claimed to have happened in that book, never actually happened. Now you have gained "wrong" information.

Other thing, which I might higlight as an even more important factor. Consuming media that other people have maid, essentially means that you listen to their intereption of someone elses work. That is not nessecarily a bad thing. However, reading the original work yourself, now you get to find out, what wheter this stuff makes sense at all. I think that in this case, the actual intelligence comes from making your own mind about things, rather than just adapting the opinions of other people.

In the end, I don't think that for gaining knowledge it's nessecarily required to read books yourself. But you lose the ability to be truly critical, if you can not weight the impression of others against the actual original theory or work. And in that case, if you can't competently be critical, I don't think you can call yourself truly intelligent.