That's not really a counterpoint. That's how most stories work here. They try to get rid of chanting altogether. But if chanting is part of the magic system you don't need to get rid of it. Magic isn't really comparable to guns or gunpowder as it's not real. You can make any magic system, even making one that forces chants to work.
Imagine a world where you don't even discover gunpowder. Instead, you dig into the ground and find guns. It's stupid, but we are talking fantasy where you can do anything. I can only question the imaginations of authors. Also, while we are on this topic it is all FANTASY. How much a reader can suspend disbelief is up to them. Every reader will be different, and not all of them will even question why people are chanting.
Ah, I didn't mean for this to come off the way it clearly has. I'll clarify.
Let's say you are miraculously isekai'd into a world with magic that requires chanting 1-2 sentences before you can cast a spell. We can make up and agree on literally any reason why chanting is required, it doesn't matter why mages need to do it, only that they do.
You, because you're a curious isekai protagonist, want to learn magic and more specifically use it to fight the bad guys, because that's how this works.
Obviously, we now have a logical checklist to follow for making magic more viable in combat in order to make you more powerful. 1-2 sentences is a lot of stuff to say in the middle of a fight that might not even last that long, so the checklist is primarily about guaranteeing that you'll succeed in casting your spell as quickly and efficiently as possible, and that it will be exactly as effective as it needs to be when it does.
The easiest way to do this would be to eschew the chant all together, and again, we can make up literally any reason why you'd need to chant, but the fact remains that the best solution to making magic more combat viable would be to shorten or remove it entirely. So, then, you, the isekai protagonist, figure out how to do magic without chanting.
Now we have a problem. If you're the only one who has figured out how to do this, either the author wasn't skilled enough at composing the magic system and this is a plot hole, or the author wasn't skilled enough at understanding what their magic system would do for their setting and this is a fundamental flaw in the setting that makes any character that isn't our protagonist seem incompetent.
This is my problem with chants. I like chants, they're badass, they're thematic, they fill what would be dead space with epic poetry or the hints of a magical language or with badass anime-style attack names - but they must necessarily be either a plot hole or a fundamental flaw in the setting unless the author is prepared to cover literally all of the bases.
Some are, and god damn do I respect them for it. Some don't, and in that case I prefer an author lampshading the problems with chanting over never addressing them at all.
To be clear here I've used chanting in all of my fics that have magic, with overcoming chanting explicitly being a way to signify that someone is stronger than the average trash.
