> I find it to be much easier to infer someone's mood and intent when I talk to them vs. reading chat messages.
All the deaf programmers of the world would like to have - haha - a chat with you. You'd surely quickly recognize their mood :P
I'm being sarcastic, but the accessibility angle is a serious one.
> and that "something" may or may not be knowledge that should be spread through the team
Whatever you talked about, either resulted in a decision (which should be documented anyway, because you never know who and when may be affected by it) or it didn't, in which case it could have been an email to one person or a group of people.
> I find it to be much easier to infer someone's mood and intent when I talk to them
That's a problem with the literacy of that person. All the words needed to express various moods and intents are there in the dictionaries; this is a battle-tested, mature technology (I mean, written English) which only got so much better since we're able to attach funny cat pictures to each sentence now.
> There is no universally better communications mode.
Of course, as it depends on what you consider "better". What I'm saying is that text is better for accessibility, transparency, scalability and searchability. Speech, on the other hand, makes expressing one's emotions easier. Such an advantage.
Probably the only good use for a call is to notify all the right people when some disaster happens (and really quick - seconds to minutes - decisions are required) or in case a CEO prepared a New Year's speech (at least if they honestly worked on their public speaking skill). Everything else is unnecessarily disruptive, favors quick responses when thoughtfulness is often more important, and gets incredibly messy quickly when you start adding more people.