The Star Trek transporter idea came up at a meeting when they were trying to figure out how to cut production costs and one of the things that came up was to s3crsp a shuttle craft and production costs for those particular scenes, so they came up with the transporter as a cost effective substitute.
A friend wondered why they didn’t just use the transporter to put a bomb somewhere when they needed to destroy it. Gotta be cheaper than photon torpedoes.