Sounds like a fair trade for both partners
As a digital nomad (well... a potential one) these visas are great, but they don't let me do anything I couldn't do on a tourist visa. Of course it's a lot more advantageous if you're not a privileged national.
But what's in it for the Korean people? They get a small number of relatively wealthy visitors who use housing and infrastructure but don't pay taxes. They likely spend less than other tourists, and use more resources.
In Germany, the freelance visa requires "local economic interest", which translates to having German clients or a reason to work from Germany. Digital nomad visas seem to want the opposite.
It works differently than Germany for example.
Additionally with their population trendline I can imagine that Korea will be happy to have even more tourists, especially ones who stay longer. Residents are maybe preferable but I don't know that they're mutually exclusive
I work in a highly regulated industry (finance), where employers are very sensitive about remoting in from other jurisdictions. Under my previous employer, I wasn't allowed to remote in from Thailand under a tourist visa, but (pre-full-invasion) I was allowed to remote in from Ukraine on a tourist visa as long as I went nowhere near Crimea or the Donbas. (I requested official clarification about remote work on a tourist visa in Ukraine, and got back a somewhat bemused response basically "Why on earth would we care, as long as your work is fully remote and you get out within 90 days? Did I miss some detail that would make us at all interested?")
Plenty of people in Thailand do illegally work fully remotely on tourist visas, and the government seems to turn a blind eye at present, as long as nobody is causing trouble. I looked into Thailand's digital nomad visa, but it would have required my employer to have a presence in Thailand. My employer at the time had no employees in Thailand, and apparently my employer's P.O. Box in Bangkok wasn't sufficient for a nomad visa. I had enough seniority at my previous company that they might have considered sub-contracting my work out to me via a Thai company owned by my wife, but it would have required pulling in a lot of favors and probably getting some partner-level approvals.
I mean what's the difference between a tourist with a laptop and a digital nomad? If you have no local clients, no local space and you officially reside elsewhere, it doesn't really matter.
Staying longer only makes sense if you grow economic roots too. You can't have a village with only digital nomads. Their taxes don't build bridges or create a community.
Is it a violation of my tourist visa to take a phone call from work when I'm on vacation?
The big benefit is the prolonged duration of the visa that allows you to really settle in and live there for a while.
For Korea obviously the advantages are the same as tourism.
most goods have VAT there, so this is not entirely true, i guess you mean income tax.
1. Right now you can be a "tourist" and have to leave/re-enter every 3 months. So things like renting an apartment for a year become out of the question, since SK could arbitrarily not let you re-enter. So you're stuck with the whims of hostel / airbnb owners.
2. Being a "tourist", you can't open a bank account or get a legit phone number. So you can't verify on Naver, which means you can't do things like book appointments for businesses that use Naver (which a lot of them do). You can't use KakaoPay without it either, so exchanging money with South Koreans means resorting to bitcoin which is just tedious.
Not to mention having a full year instead of having to do a visa run every 3 months and risk being rejected.