I work in software engineering, and it's frankly annoying to deal with the always camera off people in zoom meetings. Usually it's well correlated with bad audio too and you have to strain to understand them. I don't want to make an argument about it because they are usually rare, but if any of my 1:1 teammates was always video off then I would bring it up to them.

Get a good A/V setup people, you have the technical ability and it's one of your main job interfaces. At the very least use a wired headphone setup and microphone so we don't play walkie talkie games as echo cancellation mutes one of us dynamically and your bluetooth headset adds 100ms random delays and a lower bit rate of audio. Also do ethernet to remove the delays and packet drops from wifi.

If you're just a name on the screen, you're easy to replace. Half-competent programmers are a dime a dozen in India, Eastern Europe, and South America. And they know how to use Zoom too!

I ask for camera-on whenever there are less than 5 persons in a call.

The fact of the matter is that most people (myself included) are able to read visual cues from others and adapt their message accordingly. Actual communication (which entails understanding) is just easier this way.

Frankly, I don't even understand the discussion about cameras. In the meetings I'm at, 80% of the time someone is either presenting slides, some document that is being discussed, some plots/figures, or code. Even when that's not the case, nobody ever complained about the general cameras-off culture of the outfit, and I don't see any reason either.