Yeah, no. Some text services and websites can/do remove content, so you might not be able to return to something at a later date without saving it locally. Once an email has been received on your end, that's it: you have the email locally (or at least in your email provider); it can no longer be removed by the person that sent it.

If I screenshot an exchange on Bluesky where someone is saying wildly racist shit, they can later block me, delete the top-level comment and all the sub-comments, but I'll still have that digital proof. If someone gets doxxed on Reddit and you screenshot it, you've got that forever, even when Reddit deletes the doxxing five minutes later. (They did that with someone that found out who Administrative Results was, and posted all the links backing up their claims. Also, Admin Results in a shitty person, and that's why he and Garand Thumb/Mike Jones get along so well.)

I never understood the appeal of taking a screenshot rather than just saving the image or text or whatever directly.

My mom doesn’t know how to save an image to her phone or iPad, so she will use her camera on the phone to photograph something on her iPad to send to my aunt.

OCR makes this strategy way more useful than it otherwise would be haha

Printing your bills and documents can save you a lot of trouble when needed.

Lies! sobs

These days elders are printing screenshots of emails (and wondering why they’re cut off).

My fiancee refuses to use a Notes app on her mobile phone. Instead, she SMS texts notes to her own number.

She also likes to screenshot and text news headlines instead of copy / paste.

Sometimes I screenshot and crop a picture I want to save if there is no alternative to saving it as a .webp

I only take screenshots of things I can't directly save. Or video games. This is the last thing saved in my phone's screenshot folder:

Get off my lawn!

Out of curiosity, what do you take screenshots of? That's not something I've heard of people doing compulsively.