To be sure, if your use case is a car breakdown at night on a country road with no cell service, you're probably better off with just using your phone.
I used to hear on the news about people getting lost all the time on the trails around Phoenix, in flip flops and without water, having to spend the night outside before they could find them. Often enough they would have warnings on the radio and TV about it.
Hell, one of the big forest fires a couple years ago was started by a lost hiker trying to signal for help.
A large search is very personnel and time intensive.
Depending on the situation though, even a relatively simple rescue can take a dozen or more people and many hours.
Reminds me of the time we were in Jungle School down in Panama. The first day was the land navigation course and a squad from headquarters had their one (and only) compass break. They ended up walking around the jungle for over a week before they found a road and flagged down a passing vehicle. If they had a way to communicate (or could read a frickin’ map) they’d have been back by chow time but, nope, the senior officers were like “they’ll turn up eventually” and didn’t even try to find them.
And failures notwithstanding, a compass and map are a pretty high reliability way not to get totally turned around/lost especially in less challenging terrain.
In this regard, broader access to communication outside of cell phone coverage is a huge benefit.
Now, this isn't discussing whether people are more likely to push themselves further or do things they're not capable of or adventure alone or go out insufficiently prepared if they feel they can just push a button and get rescued if anything happens. that broader question is an important one but for the individual person being able to communicate can absolutely make a difference in whether you survive or not.
[1] In fact, I'd argue that while over-reliance on electronics generally is a poor practice, a cell phone (along with external battery pack) should probably be considered essential safety equipment in most circumstances.
And they've probably been using it as a GPS all day which can come pretty close to draining the battery all by itself.
Modern smartphones are pretty wonderful but it's easy to put all your eggs in that one basket and have no realistic fallback.
There are PLENTY of areas people go under normal circumstances that don't have sufficient service if there's an emergency.
There are use cases although I wonder how many of the people who wouldn't buy a separate device would pay for a hypothetical satellite subscription. But I'm sure some would.
With remote working, if it were possible through satellite, digital native people would populate the unoccupied land (and oceans). The definition of “remote areas” is that you don’t know how populated they would be if network were available.
It is possible with Starlink where available. You could never have worked from my brother's house with either a hot spot or 1Mbps DSL. With Starlink, while not 100% reliable, it's quite doable.
However, I'm making the assumption that for the foreseeable future a sat option for phones would look more like the text messaging of the Garmin devices.