There's a silly sort of irony that the transporter as a narrative device was created in the first place to save money on otherwise having to create props/sets for shuttlepods that would bring our intrepid "away teams" to the surfaces of exotic planets.
Then they went ahead and created shuttlecraft anyway, because it served a narrative purpose in the TOS episode "The Galileo Seven".
Then the writers started finding other excuses to use shuttles, which made no narrative sense whatsoever.
