Regarding the three complaints:

1. If you hate GnuPG the program, there are several other implementations which are less "clunky." Have you tried them? Do they also need to die?

2. RFC 4880 was published in 2007. The state of the art of cryptography has advanced since then, much as the state of the art of email has advanced since RFC 822 was published in 1982. And just as RFC 822 has been updated over the years, there's an in-progress effort to update RFC 4880: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/openpgp/about/ Are you also calling for that working group to "die"?

3. Some poor implementation choices for the public keyservers made them unusable for a time. There's definitely room for something better—Keybase was great but understandably wasn't sustainable as a VC-funded company. I hardly think we need to throw GnuPG and RFC 4880 away because of particular keyserver implementation details. Nor do I think the keyserver failures mean the entire idea of "web of trust" is doomed.

IMO, most of the calls I've heard for PGP to "die" have conflated these issues, and proposed partial solutions which solve e.g. confusing gpg command-line flags, but don't address e.g. key distribution at all. It feels like when people say, "Gmail sucks, therefore email needs to die."