> a wall of text to parse. This suggests, that it isn’t a necessity or preferable for comprehension.
No, that suggests that those platforms understand the limitations of the medium and try to work around them - with mixed results. They still have to use a modicum of text, they just build other stuff around it to reinforce meaning.
Your critique would be valid if these platforms were not using any text whatsoever - which might well happen at some point, in the distant future, but definitely is not the case now.