Are you going to go work a job without ever talking face to face with someone there?
If not, then getting you on the phone is an absolute necessity along the path to you accepting an offer. It's also practical for covering items like salary expectations, how serious you are about job hunting, outlining the role, etc.
All of those items can be accomplished over email. I think the recruiter/employer might have more of an advantage of discussing items like salary over the phone but that's all the more reason to prefer email as the potential employee.
Nevertheless, every step prior to discussing salary and interview with the actual employer/team can be done over email. Recruiters are typically less informed on the tech side anyway so there's really little reason to phone call type interviews/discussions.
I'm happy to spend a lot of time talking interactively with hiring managers and prospective teams. Recruiters aren't hiring managers and I think the entirety of my interactions with them can be managed successfully and efficiently asynchronously.
It's true, you would want to talk to some people eventually but the current state of the affairs is that the recruiters insist on communicating over the phone only. E.g. you get a message on Linked in "Hi, I have a software engineer job, interested? Let's hop on a quick call!", if you reply with something like: where is this job? what kind of industry? what is the compensation? etc. 90% of the times will be "Let's schedule a call". If you insist - they will either keep replying the same or disappear.
If not, then getting you on the phone is an absolute necessity along the path to you accepting an offer. It's also practical for covering items like salary expectations, how serious you are about job hunting, outlining the role, etc.