> I agree that it's worse than email but for different reasons. I've found that when writing an email, people will put more time and effort into giving a complete picture in the initial email. In Slack/Teams, people give very brief descriptions that you have to ask half a dozen questions in chat or call them to figure out what they actually mean.

Yeah, that's a major component of what I was talking about, which you called out more clearly than I did. With email, people tend to compose standalone artifacts that convey a more complete idea, but chat messages are just fragments. Maybe if they were properly organized you understand the conversation later, but the fragments are interrupted by other stuff so it's too hard to even piece together the whole conversation without missing something important.