Many of the above posters not only do not like or use checks themselves, they want to stop everyone else from using them.
Precisely.
It would be good to hear from those that use cheques, to find their use-cases.
Banks would like to save money by phasing out cheques. Use of cheques is diminishing, therefore the costs are diminishing - and that reason for preventing cheque use doesn't hold water.
Banks should serve their customers, not dictate how the customers have to behave.
I don't think it's just on the Government/banks. Consumer and business habits dictate this.
There is a reason most businesses these days don't use Telegrams, Telex, or even fax for that matter. How long do you go out of your way to support obsolete methods?
Since the mechanisms already exist, it isn't "out of your way".
You mention telex. One interesting aspect of telexes is that contracts could be legally enforced if telex comms were used, since the endpoints were rented from trusted third parties. Not so for emails, of course.
You continue to have the mechanisms until all of the use cases can be satisfied by other means. I have indicated a couple of problematic cases.
Backward compatibility is very important. IBM and Microsoft never break backwards compatibility, for sound reasons. There are even some unchanged Win3.1 dialog boxes in Win11!
You can only keep backward compatibility going for so long. Eventually it just becomes uneconomical to maintain. You can only flog a dead horse for so long.
Australia has already said goodbye to PSTN lines, Frame Relay, public pager networks, Telex, ISDN and probably others I'm not aware of.
Handing over little bits of handwritten paper to transfer money between bank accounts is as archaic as the bank transaction books that used to be printed using a dot matrix printer over the counter.
I can't think of a single use-case, other than consumer stubbornness, that can't be satisfied with current technologies, in a faster, cheaper and arguably more secure manner.
As for backwards compatibility within operating systems; it wasn't that long ago we were running 16-bit applications and drivers. Look at where that support is today.