no, this is a huge trope throughout the entertainment industry... in my opinion it has little to do with the genre.

another fun game to play is 'would this movie happen if they could pickup a cellphone and talked to x character'. many pre-cell movie scripts rely entirely on moving information from one person to another in the longest way possible

It's not just you, it even has a name :

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot_plot

Just got done marathoning Cobra Kai. The entire premise of about 90%+ of the conflicts on that show are based off this very trope. It was even more obvious when watching back to back seasons and they seem to show tons of character growth when someone actually talks, only for those same characters to go right back to the toxic silence immediately in the next episode.

Have you seen Pitch Meeting on YouTube? Just pick a recent one and watch it. Lots of examples of bad writing like this trope you mention.

That said, it can be difficult to write a story if everyone knows everything all the time. That's why many books are set in fantasy worlds, pre-cell phone eras, or space settings without instantaneous communication. In modern situations, cell phones often mysteriously lose signal or run out of power, or people fail to pick up.

It's a bit like how in kung fu movies the bad guys can't use their guns ("Stop! This entire room is filled with explosives!"), or they get knocked away, or they miss a shot or two and then run out of bullets, or the movie is set in pre-gun eras. It sort of makes it hard to sustain the central conceit if a bad guy can just pull out a handgun and shoot Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan.

It’s an easy trope to add conflict into the plot. Probably will get even worse as AI starts taking the jobs of actual talented writers since AI can’t create anything novel and has to generate tropes

Writer's strike, studios replace them, we get slop writing.

We're in the third act of this drama.

Not just movies, television shows too. I really, really enjoy the horror/mystery show "From", but a lot of the nonsense would be eliminated if the characters actually talked to each other.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_(TV_series)

You're just noticing a very common writing technique. If characters communicated more clearly there would be far fewer of the misunderstandings and clueless overreactions that fuel plot lines.

It's been a pet peeve of mine for decades. It just comes across, to me, as lazy weak shit.

It's a common trope as others have said. It's more noticeable now because writing isn't respected in modern media anymore. Scripts are lucky to get a second draft before shooting starts. Writers don't get the time to workshop ideas to reduce the number of problems like no one talking or everyone being stupid. Another common one is time and space problems with off screen characters. They aren't always difficult problems to solve, but they can require time to identify and work through them that writers don't get anymore.

When I see it in a movie I'm watching, I'll just talk to the TV "So, you're not going to get on the radio and call for help? You just saw a guy get pulled away into the darkness. No? Wait, you're going to slowly walk into the darkness? You are the main character after all, so I guess you just want me to see what's in there. Thanks, I guess."

I love riffing on bad movies. When the character is finally around other people I'll say "Oooh, guys... she has a secret! It's pretty important. Probably something that will kill everyone in the station. I would tell you guys, but I think she wouldn't want me to share it."

As others have said, it's a common trope, however "The Magicians" is just all over the place as far as shows go.

My wife and I have been watching Lost (rewatch for me) and it’s great stuff but literally most episodes would be fixed through a conversation. At least the show acknowledges this from time-to-time and the characters use knowledge as leverage a lot shrug. If it wasn’t dramatic, a lot less people would watch

The best one I have noticed is are these characters in a franchise or fans of the franchise based on how they act.

Thank you so much for posting this because I had the same thought a few years ago but lost it 😂

Really good shows don't have this problem as much. There were times in Severance (my recent show obsession) where I thought some communication between characters would have made more sense - but upon reflection it seemed fair what they were keeping from each other.

But yeah some shows are like "if these two people had a 3 message text conversation the entire plot wouldn't exist" 😂