Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, if anything we'd be using XMPP or Matrix. Email is the completely wrong protocol choice for instant messaging. It's just a completely different use case. You wouldn't send a letter to the fire department if your house is on fire either.
Only because we choose it to be. When you use XMPP or Matrix you know your message will be delivered instantly. When you use email you don't. But that's only because we haven't defined an extension that tells the client whether the server can deliver messages instantly. It's not really that inherent to the system. Surely you've had at least one real-time conversation by email because both of you happened to be online…
In particular, Email has a lot of assumptions about acceptable delivery delays, bidirectional (non-)reachability etc. baked in that would be very hard to globally undo.