This is true for a lot of words and I don’t understand what the point of including letters if they’re not supposed to be pronounced.
In: 6
Depends on the word.
In a lot of words, the silent letters *were* pronounced at one point in the past, but either (a) the spelling was borrowed for a word that was pronounced differently or (b) the pronunciation drifted after the spelling was standardized.
In your specific example, the Latin root was *plumbum* (literally “lead”, as in the metal, for its use in pipes), pronounced exactly as you’d expect for its spelling. English actually borrowed it without the *b* to fit English pronunciation (Old English *plom* or *plomme* depending on usage), but it was re-added in the 14th century. I can’t find anything on why, but my best guess is that because Latin was seen as the “proper” way to do things (as opposed to “vulgar” non-Latin languages), the Latin spelling was more “high-status”.
A few other loanword examples include *tsunami* (where most English speakers don’t distinguish /ts/ from /s/ at the start of a word, but Japanese – the origin of the word – does make that distinction) and *pterodactyl* (where Greek allows *pt* at the start of a word but English usually doesn’t).
When it comes to native words, English has [a wide range of common consonant-simplificiations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_consonant_clusters) that show up in many different words. (I don’t know, but I would guess, that this is because English is unusually consonant-heavy and it’s easy to have a pileup, especially in compounds.) And English vowel spelling is a nightmare thanks to the [Great Vowel Shift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift), where English vowels nearly all drifted at almost the exact same time English spelling was being standardized.
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