Like if someone used your number as an emergency contact. Or some hospital in the world trying to contact you because someone you know got hospitalized (touch wood).
But that's pretty much already a problem because most people, myself included, no longer answer calls from unknown numbers, unless we are expecting one. And my patience even for that is running thin -- more than once in the last few months I've been expecting an incoming call (e.g. Lyft driver) and have picked up an unknown number only to be greeted by spam.
If a legitimate business or other entity wants to get through to me and isn't in my contacts, their best bet is to leave a voicemail and hope I get around to taking a look at my visual voicemail transcriptions. Most robocalls don't leave voicemail, but some are starting to.
What happened 40 years ago when home phones were the only way to contact somebody?
I'm not trying to say it's not an issue, but the mentality that you need to be connected and accessible at all times is a relatively new phenomenon. If you are in a caretaker role than sure, but if my best friend is sick in hospital and I miss it because I'm out hiking or have turned my phone off, that's just life. People are not supposed to be 24/7 contactable in my view.
In those days, you would answer the phone when it rang because most calls were legitimate contact attempts. Then telemarketing came, but it was kept somewhat in check by the need to have a human make the call. Spam robocallers are a very recent phenomenon; but they've made it so that the overwhelming majority of unknown-number calls people get are spam.
To make matters worse, 40 years ago most people didn't even have answering machines... most of the time the phone just rang and rang. Somehow we muddled through. Your point is spot on re: not being reachable 24/7 by the entire world.
The BBC used to have a service that would send those messages over the radio. E.g "to the Travis family traveling in a blue sedan, number so and so on vacation in Northern Wales, please immediately contact Bristol General Hospital, your daughter is in critical condition"; the idea was that even if you didn't hear the broadcast, somebody near your would and would bring on the message.
This is a good reason for the telcos to actually fix their shit instead of slapping this bandaid on it. But until then people are just going to manually ignore calls from unknown numbers assuming they're spam calls and the result will be the same.
In this case, maybe sending the calls to voicemail instead of outright blocking them will work. AFAIK robocallers disconnect when encountering voicemail, whereas in a real emergency they'd leave a message to call back.
This is 100% a risk I’d be willing to take. I am not trading actual every day pain for extra safety in a carefully constructed trolley problem scenario
No doubt this depends on where you are in your life.
As a single guy with no children, I'm unlikely to get any emergency calls. But my friend who has two children in school and one in nursery? You bet they're going to call her if one of them gets sick or has an accident.
If a legitimate business or other entity wants to get through to me and isn't in my contacts, their best bet is to leave a voicemail and hope I get around to taking a look at my visual voicemail transcriptions. Most robocalls don't leave voicemail, but some are starting to.