Unfortunately some of the nastier vendors (gyms are notorious for doing this) will then send the charge to collections, resulting in a worse outcome. Further, credit card companies will likely reject your chargeback before it even gets to this stage since they require evidence that one tried a good faith attempt to cancel.

For which you'll have a paper trail in email where they outright refused to cancel upon clear instructions to do so.

Sending the charge to collections and having you incur more stress and undue charges would be incredibly foolish on their end.

They'll say that you signed a contract agreeing to cancel by their preferred method, so your attempt to cancel over email is not in good faith.

Comcast explicitly allows for termination by postal mail in section 9.b.1 or by e-mail in 9.b.2 [0] yet they kept trying to send me to their retention department by phone.

In fact most contracts I've seen allow for termination by writing.

[0] https://wifilogin.xfinity.com/wifiterms.php

Oh wow, didn't realise it was in the contract. That's really on you. Lmao. Don't sign stupid contracts people. Cross that shit out when you sign up or Walk away.

True, it's ridiculous and shouldn't be necessary. +1.