So maybe I've just never seen it used properly since most of what I've seen is more along the lines of a single "General" channel that's way too hard to follow. I can definitely see the value in your "Ask [Department]" explanation which is a great example.
I've only really evaluated Teams for one use case and there were limitations that made it impractical. I was hoping to set up Power Automate rules that would let me forward an email to a group and have it auto-create a Planner task, auto-create a Team Channel with a link to the task and a copy of the original email posted, and reply to the email with a link to the channel. Then all conversation about the task happens in the Team Channel and someone can own the task to make sure it doesn't get forgotten. When the task is closed, the channel gets archived. However, there's a limit of 200 channels per team, so it's not good for short lived channels. Planner also has some crazy low limitations, but I don't recall what they are.
I know that sounds a lot like an issue tracker, but the hope was to trend towards the other scenario you describe where email, IM, SMS, etc. are all replaced by a single tool. Just email + SMS are enough to de-thread a conversation and cause confusion / miscommunication.
I've only really evaluated Teams for one use case and there were limitations that made it impractical. I was hoping to set up Power Automate rules that would let me forward an email to a group and have it auto-create a Planner task, auto-create a Team Channel with a link to the task and a copy of the original email posted, and reply to the email with a link to the channel. Then all conversation about the task happens in the Team Channel and someone can own the task to make sure it doesn't get forgotten. When the task is closed, the channel gets archived. However, there's a limit of 200 channels per team, so it's not good for short lived channels. Planner also has some crazy low limitations, but I don't recall what they are.
I know that sounds a lot like an issue tracker, but the hope was to trend towards the other scenario you describe where email, IM, SMS, etc. are all replaced by a single tool. Just email + SMS are enough to de-thread a conversation and cause confusion / miscommunication.