Why is word-addressable the exception, not the rule?
Byte operations will always be important because a lot of a modern workload involves bytes. Text processing and bytecode interpretation (including emulation of other CPUs) are obvious examples, but also device drivers often need to be able to manipulate bytes efficiently.

Byte-addressed memory can be emulated with word-addressed memory and a reasonable assortment of bit manipulation instructions, however this means that you need more instructions to do the same thing, and those instructions have long chains of data dependencies between them.

RAM is reasonably cheap, but the instruction pipeline in a modern CPU is not.

Every so often, ISA designers reason that byte and short word load/store instructions aren't that important. Within two revisions, those instructions inevitably get added. This was the case with MIPS and Alpha, for example. Code density, it turns out, is quite important.

Note that this isn't true of arithmetic and logic operations. Given a sufficient number of registers (which, I might add, 32-bit x86 and earlier did not have), there doesn't seem to be any gain in implementing byte and short-word arithmetic and logic instructions. Well, for non-vectored instructions, anyway.