As long as the paper is halfway intact, drywall is very difficult to remove and provides significant strength to a wall. It’s a composite material, and excellent fire barrier.
It’s really obvious when it’s up compared to not.
It’s not as much as lathe and plaster, but lathe and plaster is extremely difficult to work with in every other way, and far more labor intensive.
Plywood on a wall is important for shear strength, but lathe and plaster doesn’t replace it. Properly designed earthquake resistant shear walls became a thing long after lathe and plaster were phased out.
plaster & lath is harder to work with, but has many superior qualities (re: moisture, sound, heat, malleability) that it makes it worth it in many residential cases (not so much commercial, where reconfiguration is more frequent).
[0]: a lathe is a machine tool
https://up.codes/s/shear-walls-sheathed-with-other-materials
There are easy to install drywall elements (heavier drywall, or sound deadening backing sheets) that also cut down on noise.
As with all things, ‘it depends’. Lath and plaster isn’t used much anymore because the cost rarely outweighs the benefits.
In non-seismic shear wall usage, it’s allowable to use either.
(Edit: fixed my very persistent autocorrect from lath to lathe - doh, thanks for noticing that)
My favorite when checking out a potential house purchase once was a small wet spot in the middle of a wall.
When I pressed on it with my finger - and my finger went right through - into live termites!
That finger press probably saved me $75k and months of headaches.
You could bring an example of code or calculation instead of anecdote to demonstrate your point.
If that makes me rude, then feel free to downvote as desired.
TIL gypsum board is given some shear strength credit in the code books:
https://up.codes/s/shear-walls-sheathed-with-other-materials
I wouldn't have guessed it, I wouldn't trust it if it was close to failure, but there it is.
I think the least attractive aspect is how drywall fails catastrophically, and once it's broken the strength can't be restored. This is probably why I didn't expect it to be counted in structural calcs.
The workbenches in my shop consist of multiple cheap, crappy pressed-wood folding tables from Office Depot, secured to each other on multiple sides with equally-cheap metal brackets. You'd think this would result in a rickety, unsafe platform that would blow apart in a stiff wind or buckle under light vertical load, but instead they are stouter in all three dimensions than most actual retail-grade workbenches. (And I don't have to feel bad about drilling into them!)
I can see drywall working exactly the same way, given enough studs and enough nails. The problem to be solved -- and the lesson I learned when I hacked these workbenches into existence -- isn't necessarily insufficient rigidity, it's too many degrees of freedom.
The most noticeable place I've seen it is in garages; the ones that are drywalled on the inside don't seem to lean as much as those that aren't.
for a dream home, i'd love steel or mass timber for the exterior framing to reduce (maybe eliminate) interior load-bearing needs, so that interior layout is maximally configurable while still allowing lots of windows. expensive, but dreamy!
Now, if you nail a piece of cardboard to the square, the corners will stay square when force is applied because the cardboard resists that force. You could even use paper and get the same results.