I’d disagree that there has to be a trade off at all. Using hardware security keys or device based passkeys, secure authentication is actually pretty convenient now.
there's probably a term for the cognitive fallacy where you assert that however it happens to be is how it had to be. it's like normalcy bias, but retroactive.
Maybe you're right. I've certainly heard others make this claim. I just personally haven't seen a real-world example of this being true.