The remittance example doesn't even touch on use of stablecoins, which at the moment, are substantially easier to do international remittance with than bank deposits.

I wrote a list of other use cases where blockchain-based systems are clearly more efficient than centralized ones:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32393892

With respect to stocks, yes companies can maintain their own list of shareholders, but publishing that list to the blockchain standardizes the process of third party verification. The ERC20 token standard is widely adopted with tens of millions of installed wallets, and major blockchain explorers, that can interact with any ERC20 token contract. The activity the author briefly touches upon - trading - can also be made massively more efficient with a public blockchain. Being able to swap between any two tokens in the world using nothing more than Uniswap and your browser-based MetaMask wallet, is in most aspects a major UX improvement over the status quo, and thus it's perhaps not surprising that Uniswap has overtaken the top centralized exhanges in liquidity depth for several major trading pairs:

https://uniswap.org/blog/uniswap-v3-dominance

I suspect the author has never used stablecoins, or Uniswap, and if they had, they would come away with a completely different take on the potential utility of blockchain-based systems.

The big risk for blockchain based systems right now is the prospect of governments massively restricting internet freedoms to stop end users from transacting freely and privately without intermediaries.

The US Treasury placing an autonomous software program - Tornado Cash - on its list of sanctioned entities (a list intended to comprise people and organizations, not software), and thereby making it illegal for any American to interact with this smart contract, was the dramatic opening salvo in such a war on internet freedoms. To think that any US based person sending ETH to the TC smart contract from their MetaMask wallet, to gain privacy for their blockchain activity, now potentially faces years in the US prison system for that action, is extremely disturbing.

And this sort of draconianism is ultimately what the large public sector entities need to resort to keep their income-tax-dependent system alive in the age of distributed financial systems. The question is whether the public will accept their argument that crypto is so evil, that these sorts of curtailments of internet freedom are a price worth paying to stop it.