>The digital world has evolved since 1997, and email simply hasn't kept up.

Email has its warts I'll give you that, but since 1997 the world has gotten objectively worse in terms of open, distributed messenging. Everything is a fucking walled garden controlled by some data-harvesting megacorp these days.

I like email because I can roll my own server (and have done so) or I can choose to trust one of several commercial providers and we can all interoperate.