The manual nature of cashing cheques itself is the reason for this huge friction, Digital payments have largely reduced this friction by doing away with the cheques altogether.

In India anyone with a bank account can send & receive money through UPI a payment system which generates a unique id using mobile number. Now everyone from street side fruit vendors to stock brokers use this. It's so successful that U.S., European Union and several other countries are bringing their own system to emulate UPI.

Still I think there will be use cases for cheques, especially in business until UPI like system becomes ubiquitous worldwide. Perhaps a way to bridge cashing cheques and UPI like system using QR like you mention could address it.