Unless you're doing this for work which involves international relations, why would you ever need to call such places outside your own country? I live outside my home country and have never needed to make an international call.
Depends on what you’re doing and where you are. eg working in finance in Europe a /lot/ of your partners are international - and even though there are sometimes options other than PSTN, odds are your company will record conversations regardless of whether it’s on a desk phone or an app.
Again, you keep talking about work. I'm not talking about work, I'm talking about personal use. If companies want to waste money on per-minute international phone charges, that's their problem. Most regular people are smart enough to avoid this stupidity and use a chat app these days.
>I've had to call the embassy for visa/passport issues.
Why on earth would you do this? Your country's embassy is a local phone call, in whatever country you're in. Your embassy isn't in your home country, it's in the country you're now present in (geographically at least, but not legally, but the phone number is still a local number).
Also, this stuff can usually be handled online these days.
That depends massively on the countries concerned. US, UK and the like yes but for many countries even friendly ones the closest diplomatic mission is often in a nearby country, eg for Bangladesh it might be in Delhi, for NZ in Canberra. And by their nature they deal with a lot of things which aren't readily handled online.
