Earnings calls do have hard questions in them, but you might miss them because they're asked with a big dose of circumlocution.

If you look at the incentives a bit, management gets to decide which analysts can ask questions, so analysts need to stay on management's good side.

Analysts know the company's figures inside and out (often have a 10-tab spreadsheet with an extensive operational model of the company), and are asking questions to tweak key model assumptions.

So analysts ask pointed questions in shared jargon with management. You don't ask 'are you seeing a big sales drop because the crypto bubble blew up?', you say 'can you provide some color on when you excess inventory will clear from the channel?'

Analysts get their answers. Management avoids bad headlines written by casual listeners.

There's an additional layer, which is the analysts know the industry and company very well, so general bad things are already background knowledge (there's no reason to ask about them). If you want to know what the analyst already knows, then pay for their report—they're not reporters fishing for a sound bite.