Honestly, all those phone logs etc. that are scattered all over do a pretty fantastic job of world building. Sure, they're not necessarily contributing to the campaign narrative, but they do give a good sense of how things were leading up to shit going down and then during the early days. They remind me a lot of the emails/audio logs you could find on PDA's in Doom 3. Entirely optional stuff that just adds to the story/world.
Also, picking them up at level cap gives absurd amounts of experience for more loot boxes.