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lol as someone with a PhD in music and many years experience in industry and academia I can't rationalise such a reductive view of music as anything but lack of lateral thinking to imagine a world where western notation isn't king.Well, if you felt the need to "lol", let me LOL back at you :-)
No PhD, but as someone with years of music training, who has travelled all over the world, and with a couple of professional musicians in the family, coming from a country with its own ancient music notation and millenia of musical history, and who has non-western modes and tradition, I can't even imagine the pedantry of your comment.
Musicians all over the world:
(a) playing westernized music (which covers about most of the charts everywhere, from Asia to Latin America and Africa), and western music directly
(b) playing western music directly (classical, jazz, rock, blues, etc)
(c) playing other genres with traditional western notation and even influences (tango, samba, and so on)
deal predominantly with western music theory, notation, and instruments -- and which cover a huge chunk of global musicians.
But
(d) even traditional "folk" (ethnic) musicans adapt to westernized versions of local music, with few exceptions, and use standard western notations (or notation hacks, like tablature and chord charts) in the studio and the concerts.
Heck, our traditional music is modal and microtonal, but it's mostly translated and played in your run of the mill western scales and keys. And I've seen the same all around the world.
You might have in mind places like India, China, Indonesia, etc, but still most pros will use western style music theory and write with western notation than not. To the point that the exceptions are more folkore than actual every-day chart music.
>I've also rarely worked session musicians who aren't orchestral who use anything other than charts and an enormous amount of the music we consume in the west is produced in a DAW or whatever without ever touching notation...
Which is neither here, nor there. The Nashville number system, for example or a piano roll is still based on western music theory and norms (even if not notation), and those musician will still 99% use the typical major/minor/etc scales.
The problem with a deep knowledge of musicology in this regard is that it makes it very easy to lose the forrest for the trees, and e.g. know 1000s of local / oral etc traditions, etc, but not see that those are nonetheless niche and very much not the norm in the day to day music of a country, and difficult to even find in the radio/charts in most countries.
The rest are as representative as e.g. jazz is in 2021 US musical tastes, charts, sales, and so on...