Sure, you need revenue to generate a profit, otherwise you'd be generating profits from nothing. You can also have organisations who are specifically "Not for profit", they balance sheets will frequently end up with a 0 dollars in profits each year, and that's as expected, but they too need revenue to do anything.

For certain types of companies, revenue is easy. I worked to a company that did mostly consulting, but would also sell you hardware or software licenses, so customers only need to interact with us, and no one else. Technically we could just have given away hardware, and we frequently did sell servers at a lose. That shows up as revenue. As long as you have money or credit to sell expensive stuff at a lose, then revenue is easy.

That's not the main point though. The point is measuring companies on revenue is pretty stupid, without also looking that profitability.