The consequences of breaking a rule are just that you have to... deal with the consequences of breaking that rule. To the extent that that rule has consequences, and the consequences are enforced. Like, if you stop showing up at your job because you disagree with the labor conditions, you get fired. But if everyone in the factory stops showing up at their job, it's suddenly called a "strike" and the apparatus for punishment doesn't work any more... maybe this time, the consequences for the same action are "you get a raise and better healthcare".
The rules for legislative bodies generally allow legislators to take more and more extreme actions to influence which laws get passed. As legislators take more extreme actions, the consequences get correspondingly more severe.
This seems like "functioning as intended" to me. The absentee legislators have skin in the game... it's not like they can freely walk away from the legislature whenever they disagree with a law. Just like a striking factory worker can freely walk away from their job at the factory and go on strike. These more extreme actions fizzle out, force the other side to reach a compromise, or backfire.
The idea that people "should" just sit down and talk things out doesn't scan, IMO. These people are accountable to the people who elected them first, and the legislative body second.
If anything, this should demonstrate that the winner takes all model of elections has driven us to a polarization where nuclear options are being deployed. This means packing either sides ball and going home is a better, more likely option than achieving any compromise.
This is the danger of diametrically opposed political tmrhetoric. If the majority of legislators are heavily polarized rather than swingable centrists, nothing will ever get done.
The reason that these quorum rules are so old is because people have been evading quorum for decades or centuries. Just take Bob Packwood (D-OR) as an example... in February 1988, he was forcibly carried into the US Senate chamber by capitol police. Or look at Abraham Lincoln, who tried and failed to evade quorum in the Illinois senate in December 1840.
The nuclear option, IMO, is civil war. Which has happened and continues to happen across the world, at great cost to life. Absentee legislators... IMO, just bureaucracy in action. I will accept an inefficient or wasteful bureaucracy any day, if the alternatives are worse--and there are many plausible worse alternatives.
You can argue it's normal; and preferable to actual blades and bombs violence. I argue that if you have a group shoving a stick in the spokes of Government that hard, the violence is well under way.