The main advantage? Their packaging very conveniently consists of a bowl that is used both for cooking and eating the food. This means you need neither pot nor plate to enjoy some quick noodles. The only extra equipment you need are chopsticks - but disposable chopsticks are given away for free in any supermarket or convenience store.
There are two variants that I've tried: soup-style noodles where the water used for cooking the noodles become part of the dish, and regular noodles where you dispose of the cooking water.
For the first type, you simply remove the cover, remove the sachets containing greens and spices from the bowl, fill in hot water, wait, add spices and greens, stir, and eat. Here's an example:
The other type is a little more involved. The tricky part is that you somehow have to get rid of the cooking water while retaining the noodles. This is solved with a simple packaging trick: the cover consists of two parts. The first part is just like above, a regular cover that gives you access to the sachets in the bowl and an opening to add water. The second part has several small holes, similar to a strainer, so you can just tilt the bowl, water comes out but noodles stay in. After that you remove the entire cover and add sauce and spices from the sachets.
The downside is that the packaging is huge compared to the amount of food contained in it. It is also not easy to compact the bowls, so they take up a lot of space in the trash can.
But in my limited experience, that's just how it is in Japan: if possible, always opt for fancy packaging or double-wrapping or both, regardless of how much trash is produced.
