Workplace culture? When we were in the office, whiteboards were used at least weekly.

A bit different now with remote-first or hybrid... If one person isn't in the office, it's basically dead in the water.

Probably different fields. My company made enterprise CMS software so not much of what we did really required modeling.

Perhaps you didn't really need them. The team I worked in used them a lot but that is because we had two week intense brainstorming workshops several times a year. We would sometimes have half a dozen of us drawing and writing on a huge whiteboard at the same time, all the while arguing about what was the best way to solve this particular problem. This was in a combined electrical engineer/software developer/physicist team.

Without the whiteboard we would have been sketching on paper and would have been buried in waste paper within the hour.