In many cases, in my experience, it’s because it’s way more efficient face to face. You can always follow up with written confirmation.

In my experience if you are going into a large (more than say 5 people) meeting to get a consensus for a decision you've made, you start with one-to-one conversations with every meeting participant, get them on side, then the large meeting is just a rubber stamp.

That's another reason for them. Can't make verbal promises to you and then forget about them via email.

Most people are slow at typing and don't have great reading comprehension.

This means it is less "work" for them to speak and listen than it is to type and read.

And many people lack listening skills and don't retain all the details of a watercolor conversation.

> Written down communication makes things impossible to wiggle out of later on, meaning the writing needs to happen anyway, why waste time on the face to face?

Written communication often takes orders of magnitude more effort, since it lacks the immediate feedback loop.