(a) they're not pictograms and (b) hieroglyphs worked for thousands of years.
(b) So why'd the Egyptians stop using them? What makes them right for today's needs?
Egyptian hieroglyphs, in their ornate form, clearly depict various items like reeds, birds, arms, and snakes. But those glyphs don't actually refer to the reeds, birds, arms, and snakes they show; rather, the ancient Egyptian writing system is largely alphabetic. Their formal letters were just much prettier than ours.
It wasn't a voluntary act, trust me and with the rise of the emojis as a medium of communication, I can say that we or the ancient Egyptians had it right all along in using hieroglyphs.
I'm out. This thread is 200TB of crazy on a 10TB drive.
Also, you're EXTREMELY overestimating the individual agency of the ancient Egyptian in this matter. Most of the citizens of ancient Egypt were illiterate and only a certain class or caste had the privilege to be able to read and write but the rest of the population were completely oblivious to those icons and therefore your argument is just baseless.
And in fact that's why they're HIEROglyphics, they were the priestly writings. (compare to demotic, as also seen on the Rosetta stone).
English is the primary programming language, not because a team of dedicated Anglo-Saxons are pointing rifles as the head of brown people, but because American trade provides the most profit motive between 1974-2008.
A "primary methodology" only applies in "most" cases, not all of them.
Lots of languages have perished for outside forces other than trade -- the Hebrew wasn't abandoned because a better trade language came around, but because Israel was conquered and the locals scattered. Other languages were persecuted by decree. Others died because their native speakers were eliminated. And several other ways (e.g. Mussolini tried to smooth out local dialects of italian using the powers of government plus radio and early cinema).
Religion can and does preserve memes and linguistics, but only trade can scale it out.
If it was just for trade, language learning would be relegated to merchants in those countries and few others.
Government, bureaucracy and occupation matters more than trade in this regard. That's how latin become the norm in a large area during the roman empire -- and not because everybody in those regions traded directly with Romans or couldn't agree on pricing otherwise.
Same e.g. for French -- it's not because of trade they got big as a language in the 18-early 20th centuries, but because the french run a big colonial empire.
And English, beyond trade, were the language of the big British colonial empire, and afterwards of the dominant culturally power that was America (Hollywood, rock, pop culture etc.).
That would make sense if you had many debates with the parent and he always blamed unrelated stuff to imperialism.
In this case he talks about a specific historical example, where we have a specific historical account, which happens to agree with the parent.
They didn't just go out of style, they were phazed out when the country was invaded, along with other aspects of the local culture. For centuries after Alexander, in Egypt you wouldn't get promoted to the higher ranks unless you were Greek (or Greek speaking) for example, and the local population was kept as second rate citizens. Then came the Romans, then the Arabs, ...
But clearly you have a specific self-made explanation, that they just "couldn't work" and were abandoned for that, history be damned.