It depends on the thing at hand. Some things have value because others use them. Chat apps tend towards monopolies because of this.

Email's just so damned old everyone uses the standard and it kind of dodges the issue.

Email's also structurally a bit different - it's a set of one-way sends to select recipients, with chats you moreso go to a place and read the place's signboard.

You could in principle just use mailing lists under the hood instead if the UI wasn't garbage.