That seems very American-centric. I answer every phone call I have and only twice in my life has the call been an attempt to sell me anything. Both times I've left my number and forgot to disable the checkbox that said "you can call me once for a sales offer".

There's nothing in "society" that prevents phones from being a normal thing. It's all in the signal to noise ratio of the phone calls themselves, and that's a solvable problem.

Business owners whose numbers have been published have the same problem here: loads of scammers and scummy salesmen spamming their phones all day long. I'd consider it a mistake to use a publicly listed number as your always-on contact method, but that's victim blaming and not a real solution to the problem.

My point is: with some proper oversight and enforcement of decent laws, there's nothing wrong with phone numbers.

Every major chat app and mobile platform has some kind of (video) calling functionality for a reason, interrupting people for a realtime conversation is a feature people want and use. The failure of the American telecommunications market doesn't take away from that elsewhere in the world.