That's definitely an argument within the community. Radio underlies a lot of modern tech like satellites, Bluetooth, and cellphones which are all just implementations of the same stuff you learn getting your ham license.
The primary goal of folks learning radio tech (via ham) today cannot be just talking to folks far away because, as you said, that's a solved problem. When you do get on these digital channels you find most of the conversation is about how you did it -- or ensuring that it worked. In other words, folks are using these technologies for exactly what you said -- learning about the radio side of it.
Just FYI, the hotspots use digital radio to communicate with your digital radio and Wi-Fi to communicate with internet servers, so they are radio devices, too.
I heard this phrase often when studying for my license, "Your license is a license to learn". It took me a few months to really internalize that.
Getting into the hobby, I was looking to unlock exclusive frequencies that would give me more range than FRS and isolation from FRS traffic.
While it did that, I found that benefit largely went unused. My comms aren't private. What I wanted from the ham bands didn't benefit me in the ways I wanted them to. Heck my identity isn't even private. In addition, anyone I want to communicate with have to be hams as well.
Like you said, outside of an emergency, there are more reliable, private ways to communicate by using the Internet. The use case I was trying to solve for is better suited using VOIP on a phone.
What I found instead in ham radio is the a world of experimentation. I'm building antennas and radios. I'm hooking radios up to computers to communicate across the planet. I'm hooking up my phone to a walkie-talkie to send messages over APRS and Winlink without the Internet. Not because I need to, but because I can and it is fun to figure out how to do these things.
On top of all that, it is just enjoyable to turn on the radio with a cup of coffee and call out and see who can hear you. It is reminiscent of the early days of IRC and ICQ when you just turned it on and someone interested in the same thing as you was just waiting to connect. For the most part hams are just happy to have someone to geek out with and that's reason enough to connect.
The primary goal of folks learning radio tech (via ham) today cannot be just talking to folks far away because, as you said, that's a solved problem. When you do get on these digital channels you find most of the conversation is about how you did it -- or ensuring that it worked. In other words, folks are using these technologies for exactly what you said -- learning about the radio side of it.
Just FYI, the hotspots use digital radio to communicate with your digital radio and Wi-Fi to communicate with internet servers, so they are radio devices, too.