That's a very biased view ("many people work like that so they like it") and I disagree.
I think that email based development is a fence to contribution. At least for myself.
Despites being of that generation, I really started contributing to open source when the GitHub model appeared (and previously in the Perl world thanks to rt.cpan.org, a ticketing system with both web and e-mail interfaces). I prefer to have communication centered about one project to be hosted with all the other data about the project instead of having everything in my inbox.
Few open source projects start nowadays with a mailing list based development process. I can't even cite one.
Most of the projects on https://sr.ht/ (basically all that aren't only mirrored there from somewhere else) do (as it did itself).
From my experience, spam/abuse is more likely with addresses used with online shops (the smaller ones seem to get hacked quite often) than with mailing lists.
Think of it this way: The Linux people and many other OSS projects have no problems with mailing lists.