I think this perhaps sums up my feeling about this whole topic; which is that YMMV.

My world is divided into 2 spheres, personal and work. My personal world runs on WhatsApp. But then in my country everyone has WhatsApp. Nobody uses SMS (other than for spam and OTP), nobody cares about this week's offering from Google or Apple.

Voice calls, group chats, polls (invaluable for group decisions) DMs, etc.

I don't negate uour experience of it. Clearly it failed for you. But the nature of a thread like this is that it's all just personal experience, which is, not surprisingly all over the map.