I think a good middle ground here is audio, with transcriptions.
I'm making a chat application for this called heysync, which is similar to slack or IRC, but with embeddable auto-transcribed audio messages as a primary feature. You can type messages out as normal, or send audio, and people on your team can scan/read it, and decide to listen, or listen by default. It's more human than text, way less stressful than sync video meetings, and enables asynchronous conversations over several days or across timezones.
I'm nearly done building a first version, so if anyone would like to hear more or try it soon, there's a website and mailing list signup at: https://heysync.chat
Thanks for asking -- we've played around with it a bit! Mostly as tests as features get implemented, e.g. live-playing incoming audio, or playing forward through multiple messages at a time, but it's kind of addictive so we've ended up just chatting sometimes too.
Heysync definitely shares concepts with iMessage's audio snippets (or WhatsApp's, Signal's, etc.), but automatic transcriptions let you decide to read or listen at will.
It's also different in that it's got features similar to IRC or a slack-like, so channels and DMs, markdown and code highlighting support, and soon enough reactions, threads, bots, etc. Beyond that, I'm also working on adding built-in support for "structured" meetings, like daily standups, because that seems to be a major use case.
I'm making a chat application for this called heysync, which is similar to slack or IRC, but with embeddable auto-transcribed audio messages as a primary feature. You can type messages out as normal, or send audio, and people on your team can scan/read it, and decide to listen, or listen by default. It's more human than text, way less stressful than sync video meetings, and enables asynchronous conversations over several days or across timezones.
I'm nearly done building a first version, so if anyone would like to hear more or try it soon, there's a website and mailing list signup at: https://heysync.chat