As someone who is often late replying to emails and feels compelled to put in an apology, it's because my experience is that most of the folks emailing me (that aren't cold emails, e.g. things related to actual work/activities) are generally expecting a reply within one or two business days, so when it takes me a month to get back to them a brief apology is in order. The apology isn't because I feel I've done something wrong, per se, it's because I know that my timeliness didn't meet their expectations and they may have had to move forward without my input. Sometimes that's fine, sometimes I'm an SME that they need input from and they may have been waiting and my lack of reply was a blocking action.

The quantity of apologies I write in email replies is directly correlated to how overworked I am from existing in a reality where the existence of unproven tooling causes more work to be put on my plate without any realistic avenues to manage it. When everything is urgent, it can be impolite to be explicit about your priorities, but waiting to reply implicitly makes the point that something else was more important, and that is something which has political consequences, especially in business. Ultimately, like any element of etiquette, it's about smoothing over the rough edges so we can all get along and to assuage any feelings that the other person may have that they got stiffed.

I wish things worked the way the author thinks things work, and maybe it does in the world of academia or wherever this person is insulated from the consequences of late-stage capitalism and the gnat-like attention span that social media has inculcated into the global population. But in the business world, especially in the US, and especially in 2025 onward, there is an expectation that every individual person can do the job of a team of 6, and that responses need to be done with urgency to every missive. That's clearly an unrealistic and unfair expectation, but because all of us want to avoid being starving and homeless, we do our best to meet that expectation anyway, hence why burnout is epidemic and we all hate the current timeline.