So I already know that Kanji isn’t used in certain situations for various reasons like:
Kanji for animals, plants, etc are rarely used since there are just so many and remembering the 檎 in 林檎, or matching the kanji to a word like きつつき, just becomes tedious after a while.
Deprecated/Time consuming kanji like 鬱, くじ of 宝くじ, or 綺麗 which is usually きれい or キレイ.
And while this may not have a conclusive answer, why are words with Jouyou kanji written primarily in kana? Words like 叱る(しかる) , 暫く (しばらく), 煩い( うるさい ), and there are definitely more examples which I can’t think of, even though 暫定 or 煩雑 use kanji.
These words aren’t common verbs/grammar points like する, できる, ついて, によって, which aren’t written in kanji, nor do they have irregular pronunciations, so why aren’t words like 煩い written in kanji?
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It depends on what you’re reading. Hell, read fics on syosetu.org and you see them in kanji all the time. Generally (not always, but generally) when a writer writes something in kana instead of kanji, or uses furigana for a word without it being for ateji, it’s because said writer is expecting a decent portion of the target audience not to be able to read said word in just kanji. If you watch younger Japanese let’s players or vtubers you will constantly see the player not be able to read one word or another. It’s somewhat of a self-propagating trend, people can’t read a word in kanji because they don’t see it in kanji very often -> writers don’t write the word in kanji very often because people can’t read it, repeat. Sites like syosetu buck the trend because the text is displayed in the browser, thus the writers figure if a reader doesn’t know how to read a word they can look it up instantaneously anyway so it doesn’t really matter since it won’t interrupt the reading. Thus they go ahead and use super rare kanji like 鏃 or 塒 because why not?
Remember, the ability to read a word has very little to do with whether the kanji in that word are in the joyou list or not. All that matters is whether or not the reader knows the proper reading for that specific word written with those specific kanji in that specific order in that specific context.
Just wanted to comment that you see a lot more 綺麗 and 鬱病 and such on twitter than I expected when I started learning. It may have originally been due to the character limit, but you see it even in short comments a lot. Complicated kanji seem to be coming back now that many contexts don’t involve hand writing them.
Depends on the situation, but native speakers aren’t crossreferencing a list when writing unless they’re writing for a publisher, and even then it might be a different list (there’s the 新聞常用漢字表 , for example).
In casual writing, people are a lot of time not really thinking deeply about this. They’re just accepting what the IME spits out as long as its readable and moving on.
煩い read うるさい is technically not on the 常用漢字 list though. The list also includes readings and わずらい would be the reading for 煩い. Different word entirely.
The only reason is habit and convention–there’s no hard system to it. Though as others are saying, living in this era of typing and IME is bringing a lot of these back!
Most of the times, kanji and hiragana reading for the same words are interchangeable. Sometimes, it’s just an author’s preference, and sometimes they use them interchangeably, and sometimes they can’t even be consistent within the same paragraph (mostly found on syosetu).
But for 綺麗、きれい、キレイ, there are nuances among the three. See here: https://note.com/kenjisato09/n/ne6dc7a4565c9