My father was pretty serious about this as a hobby - SP7DRV - had shortware CW and voice connections with pretty much all the coutries, remote islands (when there was an expeditions) and some countries that do not exist anymore so his tally was more countries than there are in the world.
Personally I prefer the convenience of fibre connection + TCP/IP but I get that in a time of hypothetical crisis or war this could prove useful.
War in Ukraine shows it's more Starlink + Internet rather than HAM radio but there's still a use case.
My father, W1HDX, similarly was so into HAM that it was a large part of my childhood, even though I never got my license. I very much remember his explorations of packet radio in the very late 1970s. And when he put up a couple of large dish antennas in the yard to start receiving weather satellite transmissions, the entirely ignorant neighbors complained that he was "irradiating the neighborhood" and the other local kids thought he was talking to space aliens. These days he's into mapping the radio emissions of H1 regions.
