The only way I've found to get around this is to either temporarily disable the setting if I am expecting a particular call or make sure that I have contact info for every single person I interact with during these exchanges.

Even if I know where the call is coming from, your experience shows it is still possible to mess up because you can't possibly account for all the kinds of weird phone systems people might be using.

I wish there was a setting to turn the silence unknown callers feature off for x hours. As it stands, I'll manually toggle it during periods where I know I might get an unknown call I actually want to answer. Leaving it on 99% of the time has dropped my spam calls significantly.

You can set the focus modes to do exactly that, but for all calls

I always keep my phone on if I'm interviewing (or dealing with mortgage or govt bullshit) because you have to answer unknown calls regularly. I also turn it on if I'm expecting to sync up with someone specific.

But otherwise, I leave my phone on silent and have it set not to notify me about voicemails. My friends and family know how to reach me.

A lot of people are not in situations where they can be cavalier about basically not being reachable by phone from someone not in their contacts. To be sure, the idea that we're always reachable is quite a modern phenomenon. Nonetheless, it's something of an expectation in many circumstances and behavior patterns take it into account.

The good news I guess is that, while I'm sure people vary, spam phone calls and texts seem to have gone down quite a bit for me to the point where they're a very occasional annoyance.

I nearly missed a "next steps" call from a recruiter recently because of this.

The solution to me seems clear: use video/voip apps for everything and ditch the phone number. I don't know how to reach that critical mass. It feels like we should already be there with zoom and teams, but apparently not.