Email as a technology is insanely crufty.

It feels somewhat hacked together (because, largely, it is); and there are significantly more bots than people using it (which is somewhat self-fulfilling).

But when I read the leaked/disclosed emails from founders during tech's boom in the late 00-s and early 10-s, I'm left feeling like: this is kinda nice.

You don't need to write long prose, email chains are reasonably self-contained, can include practically anyone and since nobody seems to have a total dominance on mail clients; they pretty much stick to the lowest common denominator. (though, HTML seems to be very much accepted behaviour for email clients, even though it was NOT when I grew up).

So, in the end, it's the safest medium to reach the most people, and incidentally it's also the most "comfy" in that I can optimise my own experience of email if I want to. Nobody cares if you use outlook/gmail/thunderbird/mutt or whatever. It's just email.

This is a pretty strong contrast to the modern web which pretty much requires Chrome or modern messengers which require/enforce their own first-party clients. Even if they happen to support federation (like Teams) which isn't a given.