Not to sound snarky, but what’s the point of chatting if you could hang out face to face and have the same conversation in a ten minute timeframe while seeing their reactions?
Chatting is quick, convenient, low risk, and low-effort.
I personally prefer to talk on the phone to chatting over text, because it's much faster and you can tell all sorts of things about a person by the way they talk that you can't over mere text.
If you unilaterally decide it’s an unworthy stage of the process, that’s likely to be very self limiting and signals quite a bit about this person’s ability to “eat their vegetables of life.”
Another perspective: would you interview someone who just sends, “I don’t do well with résumés or phone screenings. Let’s jump to the interview.” ?
Edit: to more directly answer your question, if both parties prefer that then by all means! But that’s not exactly what this thread is about.
Hypothesis: this behavior is correlated with how many messages you receive, so very attractive men with a photographer buddy likely have the same approach.
If you have 10 suitors at a time, it makes sense to filter them using days of texting. Much less time investment than going on a date with each of them.
When you have 1 or 2 matches a month, the texting game is a bigger waste of time.