I mean, Korea did it and they seem to be doing fine.
In the late 1800's and early 1900's, there was a movement in China and Japan to stop using Chinese characters in an attempt to modernize / westernize.
The argument is that Chinese characters are complex to learn and write. Theoretically, moving to a phonetic system or completely switching to Latin letters would make education and communication easier.
Called 漢字廃止論（かんじはいしろん）in Japan
Political Context
If Chinese characters are not extinguished, China will fall - Lu Xun (漢字不滅，中國必亡)
Colonialism in the 1800's showed the difference in power and technological development between the East and the West
Why did Lu Xun hold such views? Did he really think that the Qing Dynasty's defeats in the Opium Wars and the Sino-Japanese War were caused by language?
Rapid industrialization and societal reform in response to the perceived threat
Meiji Restoration (1868)
Boxer Rebellion? (1899)
Language reform was also on the table at that time, I guess
Esperanto was created in the 1880's
Were characters hard to learn because of lack of standardization?
Allegedly Qin Shi Huang unified Chinese writing, but even in the 1900's, how do you get hundreds of millions of barely literate peasants to write exactly the same way with only horses and the telegram?
Simplified Chinese created very few new characters; most were already in use and the variants with the fewest strokes were chosen. This implies that most characters had several forms
Resistance
The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den was written the 1930's in response to Latinization of Chinese
The 92 character story is incomprehensible when spoken or Romanized because all characters are homophones in Mandarin (only differing in tone)
季姬擊雞記
Technology
The story of Chinese character usage is intimately linked to the technology of the time
Printing Press
How did print affect literacy?
What percentage of Chinese were actually literate when abandoning Chinese characters was considered?
Computers
Early computers could not display thousands of different characters
Inputting Chinese characters was difficult until the arrival of computers powerful enough to run IMEs