While they are a cost effective choice in the hellscape that is call centers, I wouldn't recommend anyone engage in one-ear listening for any significant length

While they are a cost effective choice in the hellscape that is call centers, I wouldn't recommend anyone engage in one-ear listening for any significant length of time. Sound heard in two ears is perceived by your brain as louder than that heard in only one ear. A listener using only one ear must raise the volume, and the harm of that over the long term (and even individual event exposures) is well studied. Anecdotally I have several people in my family that used to work in radio, spend extended amounts of time using monitors in only one ear, and now have advancing or profound hearing loss in that ear. Also, where are you pulling your notion of 8Khz capped audio quality from? Skype has historically had some issues with selection of the crappiest audio codec and sample rate that resulted in pushing many calls down to the lowest bar of 8Khz, but info I can find for Teams suggests a sample rate of 16Khz and bit rate of ~50kbps. For Zoom it looks to be 32Kbps ~50kbps. By no means approaching the capabilities of a decent audio output setup, but better than you reference.