I found that on my L5, there is no longer the option to call or text directly from gnome-contacts. I am curious if this is a bug on my phone or if it is something gnome-contacts is phasing out of?
GNOME Contacts has never had the ability to call and text. Purism does have a downstream patch in their Debian package to add that functionality. So what probably happened here is that you installed the flathub version instead of the Purism package.