Most of the field abandoned print, which is exactly why it works.
A printed thing is the only brand channel a customer has to physically decide to throw away. It sits on a desk. It gets handed to someone. It does not compete with seventeen browser tabs and it cannot be scrolled past in a quarter of a second. For a company selling considered, expensive, slow-decision work, that is not nostalgia — it is the right medium for the decision being made.
The failure mode is adaptation. A brochure that is the website reflowed onto A4 reads like exactly what it is. Print rewards a different kind of writing: longer sentences survive, structure has to be visible at a glance because there is no navigation, and the thing has to be worth the paper or it is worse than nothing.
Planned alongside digital, it does work digital cannot. A brand book settles internal arguments. A publication gives a company a reason to talk to its market that is not a sale. Direct mail reaches people who have learned to ignore everything else. Packaging copy is read at the moment of decision, by someone already holding the product.
Print is not the cheap option. It is the one nobody else is bothering to do well.