For various people, some of that flipped back, and they now record voice messages to send them through e.g. WhatsApp.
My percieved explanation for this is that most of them can't be bothered to type a message but are still very happy to waste the recipient's time. Yes, I'm not thrilled about it.
OTOH, at least these messages are still more asynchronous and less interrupting than a phone call. But the inability to skim them still bothers me to no end.
You write "wherever possible", but: Have you ever seen the beancounting itself having been under scrutiny?
I'd wager a big part of it is also the same politics based asymmetry that's visible everywhere; like nobody ever got fired for buying IBM or people only get credit for managing a crisis, not preventing it in the first place.
If I can add to that: A precursor to both of those would be the precision lathe, from which eventually two of the most crucial prerequisites for the industrialization stem: The ability to a) produce machine parts with a high degree of precision catered for their purpose and/or context, and b) the ability to develop widely established norms these parts can adhere to (or, if you will, by which they could be judged).
The steam engine wouldn't have had its impact without the possibility for e.g. precision engineered pistons, and any industrialization would have been severely impaired without the possibilities that the distributed production of exchangeable parts (even as simple as screws, nuts and bolts) to established norms came with.
Came here to comment on Gothic, too. I'd have picked the original Gothic even more as an example, though -- there, you are in a prisoner colony, even if you are in a settlement. Anger the wrong people and you won't survive the experience for most of the game.
Also the swamp camp is really close to some rather deadly creatures if you're not careful in the early game.