An out of office message is basically a quality of life feature both for you and your business contacts. By warning your clients that you won’t be able to reply to their message right away you save the time they might have wasted on follow ups. You also won’t lose prospects who might’ve believed that you’re ignoring their request otherwise.
Please note that all queries and orders posted at least [X] days before [starting date of the holidays] or during holidays will be processed immediately once we are back at the store.

Yeah, it’s very strange. I understood changing voicemails to explain that the line can’t actually be answered, but someone is checking the messages and will respond (though that was also only an issue for the first few months), but they had no reason to even mention it for email. I started my job 3 months into lockdown, and by that point, procedures were in place to pretty much allow us to operate normally, albeit with a lot more done electronically than before.
One of the only reasons I get voicemails is because our system is set up to send new voicemail messages to your email as an attached file. Now if only it would send the voicemail as a transcript, I’d be set. I don’t mind returning calls, but listening to voicemails is obnoxious, especially because people are really bad at leaving voice messages.