In the first place? We kinda did to begin with, you would phone the operator and say the name of who you wanted to phone.

Introducing phone numbers simplified this, given the operator would have to know or lookup their name, and allowed for the future introduction of automated systems. Such systems were analogue and DNS was far more advanced than them. I guess the telephone becomes so widely used and integrated under that system that it still uses a similar interface today, albeit with a cluster of different modernised interconnected backends

Like my oven clock. Six buttons with cryptic symbols on them. You can press them, push them and hold multiple buttons together and it does different things with different equally cryptic symbols appearing on the LCD. Sometimes somebody accidently pushes a button and it gets stuck in a weird state where it refuses to cook. At least I’ve worked out the correct key combo to set the current time