Why is electric charge quantized?

[kye]

What is the mainstream answer? And why is asking if the electric charge is quantized important? What does it mean to have charge that is not quantized?

 

[AlephZero]

At one level, you are asking "why are there electrons?" That is probably not a question that mainstream physics can answer (though some particle theorists might be looking a reason).

Unless you are considering charges that are a similar size to one electron, the quantization usually isn't important,and you can assume charge distributions, electric currents, etc are continuous.