I can’t imagine telling everyone I know that I’m changing my number every couple years, and I’m not even calling/messaging a lot of people nowadays. I have a family member who did something similar(not on purpose) and I still have 3 of her numbers and still get confused which is the working one.
I had a company phone about 6 or 7 years ago for a company I worked for at the time. When I was on my way out they unilaterally revoked my company-provided cellphone after convincing me I should get rid of my old private number for theirs.
I'll never do that again. It happened shortly after ditching social media and I just about all of my contact info and I haven't been in touch with some old friends because of that since then.
Even if you had the time to transfer your contacts, etc, something will inevitably get missed.
Hell, I've updated family and friends to an email address I've been using for closer to a decade and they still email the old one...
I know exactly what you mean, there's only so many times you can append "New" on the end of a contact name!
A good chunk of people will probably communicate mostly on platforms like WhatsApp/Telegram/Discord/whatever that don't need numbers at all or facilitate switching of numbers without your contacts having to do anything. I don't think that will constitute anywhere near the majority of people across the world though, switching numbers will definitely be a pain for most.
