Imagining what the protagonist would say isn't bad, but often I'm really curious to know who I'm actually playing as, especially if earlier the story says that the protagonist has a personality, character, desires, or any other attributes of a personality. There is a feeling that the game forcibly suppresses the personality of the protagonist . Often, the phrase about a silent but comfortable protagonist hides the fear of not living up to the expectations of a large number of players. Previously, a similar trick was used due to lack of budget, for uselessness in the genre, or vice versa, in order to create a duality and mystery of the protagonist, as in Little Nightmares. It's a good tool, but now it often seems out of place or misused out of habit. It's a little disappointing how big companies use it to increase sales, not wanting to take risks, and indie developers picked up this trend, not really wanting to work on the character, leaving everything to the imagination of the players. Sometimes it even seems to me that the very concept of "protagonist" is slowly degrading into something faceless, created only for the player to take his place
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I disagree that this is a cost-saving fad from big-money publishers, or even a fad at all. It was very common if not the norm for many years across many genres, especially when storage space for frivolous text was severely limited, and digitized speech was an expensive novelty that sounded terrible anyway. Over the years, text became trivial to include, while voice acting is still expensive. If anything, protagonists that speak have become more common since the early days, not less, especially in games that aren't fully voiced. There's no real financial incentive not to write some plain text; it's done for stylistic reasons. Meanwhile, in fully-voiced games, you may have the budget to voice, say, 500 lines of dialogue; the pressure here is to keep the total script to 500 lines, not to silence the protagonist specifically. At most, doing so might be marginally convenient. It certainly isn't a bullet point feature to boost sales.
I don't see any evidence that there has been a large-scale shift in the industry towards protagonists who should speak no longer doing so. That's a very strange claim to make.
It’s worth mentioning that I don’t focus too much on voice acting, I prefer text communication, it’s also easier to implement. If the problem was only in it, then this is no problem, everything is in order, but the same thing happens with text communication in games, and this is really strange for me. The hero going through a huge adventure that he doesn't react to like he doesn't care is what really bothers me lately