Intents are alive and well, but they've been broadly crippled until recently-ish (well. they still are, but at least now you can read/write stuff in a user-defined folder... kinda.). And the fancier stuff is totally broken on a large number of devices. And it's fairly complicated to support all of it and still be backwards compatible for older OSes that don't have it.
But yes! It exists, and most applications could pretty easily use it instead.
But most of it seems to be laziness / misunderstanding. And Android's broadly terrible documentation does not help this at all. E.g. a huge number of apps that want external storage permissions just use it to store external caches outside your system partition, which is very nice for people with an SD card / limited internal space. Many companies don't seem aware that this no longer requires any permissions though - you can store internal and external data in your app-sandboxed folders by default.
But yes! It exists, and most applications could pretty easily use it instead.
But most of it seems to be laziness / misunderstanding. And Android's broadly terrible documentation does not help this at all. E.g. a huge number of apps that want external storage permissions just use it to store external caches outside your system partition, which is very nice for people with an SD card / limited internal space. Many companies don't seem aware that this no longer requires any permissions though - you can store internal and external data in your app-sandboxed folders by default.