I found running smooth rolling knobbies on pavement at street pressures (15-20 psi) lets the tires 'sing' which in turn is heard by pedestrians as you are coming up on them. It was a huge, unexpected benefit on a street commuter to have people turn around and look at me, then stop their attempt to jaywalk in front of me or zig in front of me on a path. No help with morons wearing earbuds but we live in an imperfect world.
As for wearing out the tire, thats a function of finding the right tire. Any of the variations of the Chaoyang Big Daddy - most especially the 30tpi version - wear very slowly. I will get around 5-6000 milers out of one and since they wear for so long, you have plenty of time to wait out the suppliers and find your next pair on sale. I'd get them on Ebay under the Arisun brand often as not for about US$60 each, which is no more than you would spend for a decent skinny tire. They're sold as the Chaoyang Big Daddy, the Arisun Big Fatty, the Origin8 Tsunami, Panaracer Fat B Nimble, and many others. Once you learn to recognize the tread pattern you'll see it everywhere. I even got a tiny one recently (20x3.0) with downsized knobs that looked just like the big tire had been hit with a shrink ray. They are a smooth roller that are ideal at nothing but good at everything, even deep mud so long as you have a throttle and the balls to submerge the bike halfway to its hubs (and a 2wd bike

). Also (and this is a big one) no self-steering.
I put many thousands of miles over a period of years on high speed, custom fat street commuters and went thru a long learning process.
Here is a pic with those tires on (2018). Then with Snowshoes that I ran tubeless via Fattystrippers in 2019 (terrible idea; the fattystripper idea sucked for me).
The leaky tubeless setup was replaced later that year with skinnies, that rolled like a dream but at a 30 mph pedaling cruise there was too little sidewall and I feared for the frame's long term integrity, not to mention my teeth.
So to keep the smooth rolling, I went to 4.0'sto give the bike a break. They work. The Origin8 Supercell in 30 tpi doesn't self-steer and is perfect, but I've also got an Arisun Big Smoothy on the front which is not as long wearing but was on sale. Both have excellent traction. But as soon as I get up the willpower to work on a bike I don't need to ride much anymore the smoothies come off and we go big and fat again, with small knobs (I've got a good set of Surly Edna's that are the same class of fast roller knobby, wear like iron and have a casing larger than the advertised 4.3 to and matches the Big Daddys).