The chart type isn't a style choice — it's a claim about what kind of comparison you want the reader to make.
Comparing heights is easy; comparing pie slices is not. The chart type decides how much work the reader's eye has to do.
The chart is an argument about what to compare — picking it badly hides the finding you did the work to get.
Every chart encodes numbers as something the eye can compare, and the encodings are not equally accurate. Position along a common scale is read most precisely, then length, then angle and area, then colour intensity. That ranking is the entire basis for the usual advice: a bar chart beats a pie chart because comparing lengths on a shared baseline is easier than comparing angles; a line chart is for change over time because position carries the trend; and a scatter plot is for relationships between two continuous variables because it uses position twice. Pick by the question — comparison, trend, distribution, relationship, composition — and the type follows.
Match the chart to the question. Comparison across categories: horizontal bars, sorted. Change over time: a line. Distribution: histogram or box plot, never a mean alone. Relationship: scatter. Composition: stacked bar, and only when the parts genuinely sum to a meaningful whole. The underlying rule is that position is read more accurately than length, which is read more accurately than angle or area.
Science of Data Visualization | Bar, scatter plot, line, histograms, pie, box plots, bubble chart — Prof. Ryan Ahmed, 7:09