> It's a necessary evil owing to the large English lexicon filled with homophones. The Japanese stick to their ponderous use of Chinese characters for similar reasons.
This is a common and incredibly stupid argument. Note that it immediately implies that oral communication in English and Japanese is impossible.
Early video games didn't have the memory available to render text in kanji and used kana exclusively. This caused zero problems.
There's something to that argument in Japanese. According to [1] Japanese has 643 distinct syllables, while English has about 6949.
There's a lot more context in speech and video games and long-form writing than in random writing and signs. It's virtually impossible to convey a meaning to a product or company name without using kanji.
I was originally thinking about names that have intended meanings "Target", "Burger King", "Taco bell", "Pager Duty", "DuckDuckGo", "Texas Instruments", "Aperture Laboratories" etc.
I am responding to your comment that oral communication is impossible because of homonyms. I am not covering the difference between oral and written communication.
This is a common and incredibly stupid argument. Note that it immediately implies that oral communication in English and Japanese is impossible.
Early video games didn't have the memory available to render text in kanji and used kana exclusively. This caused zero problems.