before I learned of shamir secret sharing, I wondered why one couldn't do the same exact thing with a par2 like system (albiet with smaller pieces than a par2 system would traditionally have). i.e. you have X bits of data, you create Y*X/N sized recovery blocks (where Y > N). You hand each recovery block to individual users. and any N users can get together to recover the key and decrypt the contents.

if the secret is large usually it's encrypted and the payload is distributed along with the shares of the key.

but you can also just use Reed-Solomon and split the payload, the difference with Shamir is that you lose information-theoretic security (you lose it the moment you use encryption anyway) and the payload also needs to undergo an all-or-nothing-transform (AONT).

AONT transforms the entire payload into an encrypted blob which also serves as its own key, any withheld piece serves as a de facto encryption key. this is required because Reed-Solomon can have pathological cases where pieces leak information about the whole.