I like to compare calling to someone knocking on your door incessantly for several seconds.

You can ignore it or decline to answer. It's still annoying af.

So why call in the first place? And how will I ever know what the call was about? Unless you text, of course, so why not just do that in the first place?

You may not intent for it to be a demand, but unless you have your phone on silent, it will keep ringing and making noise until you do something about it. It demands an action, and tries to get your attention as much as possible.

Which is why it's designated to emergencies. This makes calling more useful as well, because now you know calls are more important, and can actually treat them with more urgency. Otherwise you're just gonna end up ignoring what may be an actual emergency, because you treat every phone call the same.

When you decline a call you don't know what it's about. The only thing I can think of when I family member calls and I decline a call is that they needed desperate help/were in an emergency and I just hung up on them.

Depends on the status of the phone when the call arrives.

One thing I enjoy about the Pixel phone experience is the call screening feature. Having a transcript of the callers reason for calling has been a great bonus!

It absolutely is not a big deal, this thread is bonkers

Or the exact same thing happens and you can't even get a response to them because you're relying on a synchronous mode of communication which requires both parties to be engaged at the same time ....

Or you could just send them a message and they'll see it when they look.