Unlike public transport, with an e-bike, the chances of getting a puncture or a malfunctioning battery increase with usage. Plus, there is also the very common bike theft and road accidents if you live in a country where bikes need to go on the road (like the UK)
An e-bike with a dead battery becomes a heavy bike.
Theft and accidents, okay, but the first sentence is just fearmongering.
That's a dependency. Now you need to remember to have that kit with you. This is like solving the short battery life in phones with a portable battery charger. You still have to remember to charge the charger beforehand and bring it with you. Small kits are easy to lose sight of that by the time you need them so you don't know where they are.
Tubeless tires are sadly not compatible with most bikes. I am not trying to be downer, this is just my experience (losing the kit and finding out that the bike I bought is not compatible with tubeless tires). I do agree though that bikes are definitely the way to go. But I wouldn't rely on them too much, especially on the electric components. Humans have a tendency to aim for convenience above all and being stranded in the middle of nowhere with dead phone and a bike with a dead battery in winter is not fun
You put it on the bike and don’t worry about it. This is less onerous than remembering your bus pass or cars keys.
Yet here we are, living in a world where most parents would NOT let their kids travel around unsupervised even though it has been going on for longer than the 19th century. People have also been making fires for far longer than that. Both of these are depicted as big risks. You might find it a real reach or not but the overall point is that we don't live in a 19th century world anymore and our worldview is for better or worse different.
Try ask parents who can't barely make ends meet to get a puncture repair kit for their kid. You know the kit will be a cheap 5 star rated one from Amazon/Temu and the second it gets needed it won't work as it is meant to. This is reality
I spend a lot of time traveling the world by bicycle (hence the HN username), and I have bought cheap Chinese puncture-repair kits around the developing world, whether in China itself, Central Asia, or Sub-Saharan Africa. They have always served me fine.
Now, if you're riding Mountainbike or Gravel tires, your tradeoffs are different - they sacrifice puncture resilience in favor of less weight.
As a pedal cyclist, I feel that's a reasonably sensible limit as much faster than that you should be more experienced as a cyclist to control the bike and anticipate the conditions.
A class 1 e-bike is pedal-assist and stops assisting beyond 20mph (mine, for instance, tapers off starting probably around 15 mph).
A class 2 is the above, plus a throttle.
A class 3 is anything that assists over 20mph. The "basically motorcycle" set exists here.
Anything that doesn't fall in one of those classes is a motorcycle that is not street legal and can only be rudden of private property (unless you can convince your DMV to give you registration as a motor vehicle.)
This can vary somewhat from state to state, but most states have adopted or are moving to adopt these classes.