First, forget texting. It’s shorthand, or maybe pidgin. No reason it should be judged as if it were English.
But there is a difference between evolution and entropy. Standardization actually is a good idea, “for its own sake.” I remember reading that “a gentleman polishes his shoes and knows how to use a semicolon.” Now, for some reason, I cannot even find that sentiment on Google. I know the idea of a “gentleman” is passe; it’s classist and sexist, but we don’t have a replacement descriptor yet for a person who takes standards seriously in a good way, and that’s a shame.
Language, like almost all the things we do, provides semiotic opportunities. Think of a bus with ads on its sides. The bus exists to transport people from place to place. But, as long is it’s making the trip, why not attach other things that the bus company wants to deliver and recipients don’t mind, and may appreciate, receiving?
Principally, language carries explicit ideas from utterer to audience. But how it is delivered carries other messages. Some of the messages one may want to deliver are about the utterer: how careful, skillful, respectful, educated he or she may be. Some of those messages are self-proved by observation of standards. It’s more effective to be careful and skilled than to declare that one is careful and skilled.
So we have the preposition rule. (Is the “to” in an infinitive really a preposition?) It probably does not aid clarity, but by being a rule it creates an opportunity for the utterer, especially a writer, who is being careful to say and prove “I am being careful, and you can tell I’m being careful by the fact that I am following an arbitrary rule that we both know exists and is arbitrary.” All that, just by not using a preposition to end a sentence. (A lawyer seeking to argue that a law, will, or contract doesn’t mean what it appears at first blush to say will begin by finding the grammatical errors in the text to prove the sloppiness of the thought behind it and, therefore, the expression in it.)
To use modern lingo, standards enable value signaling, which even those who deplore it do all the time, if only by calling it out. Telling someone they should not have ended a conversational sentence with a preposition is, as the wag said, the kind of arrant pedantry up with which one need not put. But so, too, is muttering “or her” to anyone who uses a male general pronoun. Such corrections give away the game: standards don’t go away; they just change. Virtue signaling is a useful thing to do, and the ability do so in a self-proving way by simply choosing one’s words — and punctuation — carefully, is reason enough to have standards “for their own sake.”
A free ride will always be a free ride. A communication without a semiotic subtext is a waste of breath. The standards change, but the benefit of having them persists.