Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Hell, as I write this my on-call phone just notified me that its eSIM isn't valid. Good thing I'm not on call yet!
I suspect all issues are ultimately caused by the carriers, not the esim technology itself.
Wow.
To be completely honest, if a hard reset removes the profile it should get reinstalled, it is actually not okay that a hard reset works.
Why is it like this? This is the way subsidized phones without physical sim work.
You can’t actually backup an eSIM. If you could, they would be easy to clone. I know Apple uses that terminology, but that isn’t what is happening in the background. Same with transferring an eSIM. A new one is issued each time.
I think the problem here is: there's no consistent regulation on how a replacement eSIM can be provisioned on a new device.
Is the fact that you don't actually own a game you bought on steam, or a movie you bought on itunes (eg. if either of them went under, or you got banned) also "just semantics" and "implementation detail"?
Yeah over exaggerations are probably not helping the cause. I’ll stick with eSim
And as a bonus the established players even have their own stores in every mall!
I don't really see the case for eSims. In theory they could save a bit of time: activating immediately upon ordering your subscription online, instead of waiting days for delivery, but my new telco still sends you a plastic card with a QR code to scan before you can download it, completely nullifying that advantage. Besides, when you want to keep your number, you can rarely activate the new subscription anyway. On top of that, there's too much that can go wrong, and recovering from problems is harder than with a regular sim which just works.
TBH that's most people on most subjects.
First one that comes to mind:
"I'm an honest citizen and never did anything wrong and never had a bank account frozen, hence it never happens to honest citizens who did nothing wrong".
Honest. But oh-so-very dumb.
Seriously, the tech is massively over vilified in this thread. You can get issues, but the alternative isn't perfect either
It's partly luck and partly choosing high trust carriers what gets you a stable experience.
My carrier lets me issue esims myself on their website. I can login, get a QR code, and scan it on my phone and the service just starts working.
Personally I find this preferable to having to go to a physical location, and the fact that I can issue a new sim card to myself anywhere in the world has been very helpful.
I don't understand. I am able to travel and load multiple eSims on my phone. If you wanted to load a second esim, what prevented you? After loading one esim, you dump the other, or disable it. Do you mean in terms of transferring ph number?
SIM cards have always been secure elements that the provider trusts. With an eSIM, you can already own that secure element and the provider can provision it with their application. You can even have the applications from multiple providers on the same physical secure element.
The major advantage is now that the expensive and time-consuming part of provisioning a new mobile service (sending out a physical SIM card) can be replaced with a few standardized API calls. This is cheaper (which makes the extra cost some providers charge for an eSIM look quite silly) and a lot quicker, which enables new business models for short-lived cell connection services.
A world where all cell service providers offered eSIMs would be slightly nicer. But manufacturers removing the option of swapping the secure element is very annoying at the same time.
I’ve had a SIM card constantly fail and require me to put my pin to unlock it multiple times in the same day. If someone wanted to call me they would not be able to because I didn’t know it was off.
RIP Headphone Jack RIP SD Card Slot RIP SIM Card Slot
It might be nice if manufacturers implement a HUUGE LOUD warning when enabling an eSIM that requires carrier authorization to remove though. Someone should put that in the Android bug tracker.
Gosh, that sounds pretty nuts if some $5 throwaway travel eSIM refused to be removed after a few days of use.
For the carriers I can see that. Especially the part where users can't move their esim without carrier cooperation. That grants telcos (and sometimes handset manufacturers) additional control over users - control that they don't get with physical sim.
And physical sim save me time and money. I get a new SIM each month. It's 1 min to swap it and update my forwarding #. Service is reliably cheap.
When I need my sim elsewhere (ex:5g router), I just move it.
I don't know, choosing service package, signing paperwork, identifying and other KYC stuff (tens of minutes) for me was always much more time-consuming than the few seconds of reading the barcode(?) from a new SIM card and giving it to the customer (or putting it into an automatically addressed envelope).
I can't see any advantage of eSIMs except that it makes harder to change providers what they of course really like.
(Anyways the security of the whole PTSN is a joke and publications about cracking cell networks, why SIM cards are even a thing? I would suspect an customer-id@service-provider.country and a password would work, too. Maybe with a zero-knowledge password proof.)
They are incredibly handy when you are traveling abroad, you don't speak the local language fluently, you want cheap data, you don't want to study 100 different prepaid plans from 10 different local primary and MVNO carriers to figure out the best offer, you don't want to wait for the shops to open because your flight landed late at night, and you don't want to scan your passport and send it to the carrier for verification and wait for hours for approval (yes, in many countries, KYC is required even for prepaid SIMs). I've lived that experience and I can't say I miss it.
...to the carrier/phone manufacturer/etc
I can even see it for the customers that fumble paperclips and don't mind living with uncertainty.
Some people might have given it up. I personally own a Sony Xperia phone, and intend to buy another Xperia next year, which will almost certainly still have both. In fact Sony is the one manufacturer that returned to a headphone jack after having removed it for a while. It might be more expensive than the competition, but this is my voting with my wallet.
What's wrong with analogue audio?
Did ditching the headphone jack increase the number of people in public who just play their music / talk on speakerphone, because now the alternative is much more complex and expensive compared to simple 3.5mm wired headset?
Before proclaiming that Bluetooth is in fact simple and cheap, consider how your situation may differ from that of the perpetrators
I remembered there was a South Park episode where Cartman was being a stereotypical self-absorbed person walking around with their phone on speaker. I looked it up, and that episode came out in 2013. At the time, most phones on the market had a 3.5mm jack. Yet people not using headphones/headsets was an experience common enough to be turned into a joke in the show.
I don't think there's much correlation between 3.5mm jack availability and using a phone's speaker output in public.
"Simple" as you've used it is open to interpretation. I personally held on to wired headsets longer than most of my friends and family. You know what I don't miss, now that I've preferred wireless for a few years? Untangling the cable. Accidentally catching the cable on something and having an earbud ripped out. Picking lint out of the jack. Staying conscious of the length and positioning of the cable in the context of my own movements.
Other than the BT connection process, which is only complicated if you're fortunate enough to own multiple devices and headphones/sets to connect to them, wireless can be a lot "simpler" in actual usage.
One point I'll make is simplicity comes in many forms. Wired headphones can be dirt-cheap, they don't run out of battery, and I don't think they're as prone to getting lost
The battery point is valid. Funnily enough, the last pair of earbuds I lost was a wired one. Myself, most of my headsets are over-ear, so they're a bit large to be easily lost. The form factor likely determines the loss potential more than the presence/lack of a wire.
This is not how Bluetooth wireless audio works. PCM audio is re-encoded on-device into any one of a few Bluetooth-capable codecs that is then streamed to the client device. This is a primary cause of latency.
The current problem is that LE Audio implementations are new with lots of headphones having them as beta.
The risk of losing one (or both) earbud is a real one. My ears don't tend to keep snug grip on the earbuds so they tend to get loose after I walk a little. With earbuds, this might just be my own singular piece but, there is also the chance that only one of the two would connect to your phone.
On the other hand, the cables get tangled together. I can't walk around with them because the cable gets stuck in the swing of my arms. Connecting them to the phone after a call had already started was a piece of cake though. With bluetooth, I never have my earbuds on when I actually need them and it's too much of a pain to take them out of my bag and connect them.
Whenever it is time to replace my current earbuds, I am gonna go for a neckband instead. It has basically the best of both, imo (I am not that sensitive to audio quality mostly) and the downsides aren't large enough (I'll think of the weight as a neck workout).
I bought a pair of double flange doohickies to replace the standard ones.
That you need a cable for it?
Most people don't need latency, and I don't really have any latency issues. I watch videos with Bluetooth headphones and they're all synchronized perfectly.
With Bluetooth I can also "just... plug it in, bam, music in my ears."
but the real response is "what's wrong with a usb-c to 3.5mm adapter"
I think it just adds friction (for measure, I feel audio jacks are pretty good)
So the real response is, "what's wrong with most companies to not provide the 3.5mm itself?"
It's good that xperia's doing this though. I think I still have phones which have 3.5mm itself so there isn't much to worry about. I think there are a lot of new phones which do offer it, I think both of my parents phones have support for 3.5mm by itself.
I want to charge and listen to music at the same time.
Note: I have not tried this. It is simply offered as an example to show they are available.
https://www.amazon.com/Headphone-Charger-Charging-Earphones-...
USB-C extension cables aren't allowed, but pass-through charging is allowed. I suspect a $7 cable from a Chinese amazon seller is not spec-compliant, but e.g. Belkin sells a spec-compliant "3.5mm Audio + USB-C Charge Adapter".
Nice. They don't work on Pixels if they don't have a DAC, because Google in its infinite wisdom decided not to include one on the Pixel series.
And cables like these violate the USB spec.
Again: what was the harm in including a 3.5mm jack?
Now you need a usb->usb + 3.5mm to keep it charged up or an add on battery.
In my experience the connection is much easier to accidentally break through movement (e.g., walking) with a USB-C adapter than straight-through 3.5mm.
I really miss having a 3.5mm output on my phone...
Hidden inside of a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter is an entire DAC with a power amplifier for driving headphones. They're complex little things.
And like any other bit of active, plug-in electronics: They're not all the same.
Some of them are wonderful (Apple's adapter sounds great and don't cost much), but and some of them are terrible.
And there's compatibility issues. The combination of an Apple headphone adapter on an Android produces a volume control bug that prevents a person from turning it up even to normal line level output voltages that normal audio equipment expects.
And there's functional issues: Want to play some lossless audio in the car or low-latency audio on headphones, and charge your phone at the same time? Good luck with that! (Yeah, there's adapters that have USB C inputs for power, too. They're a mess. And I once popped one as soon as my phone negotiated a 12VDC USB PD mode instead of the 5VDC that the adapter must have been made for. (And no, wireless charging isn't a solution. It's a bandaid for the deliberately-inflicted footgun incident that brought us here to begin with.))
And it's complicated: For a "simple" audio output, we've got USB 2 with a signalling rate of 480Mbps and a power supply, when all we really want is 20Hz-20KHz analog audio with left, right, ground, and (optionally) microphone.
And then: It often doesn't work. When I plug the USB C headphone adapter I have into my car and go for a drive, it disconnects sometimes: I observe no physical change, but the device resets, the music stops, and the phone rudely presents a prompt asking me which voice assistant I'd like to use (the answer is, of course, "None" -- it's always "None", but it asks anyway). And then I get to figure out how to make it play music again, which presents either a safety issue or a time-suck issue while I stop somewhere to futz with it. (Oh, right. Did I mention that the electronics in these adapters also include support for control buttons? I guess I glossed over that.)
Forcing the use of USB C headphone adapters and their complexities represents a very Rube Goldberg-esque solution to the simple problem of audio interconnection that had already been completely solved for as long as any of us reading this here have been alive.
Except: While Rube Goldberg contraptions are usually at least entertaining, this is just inelegant and disdainful.
Recently had a phone go bad when the thunderbolt port stopped working due to the same port being used repeatedly for charging and for audio adapter.
So when I updated the phone I grudgingly decided to get a BT earbud.
I also am a hardcore 3.5mm headphone user. Wireless headphones are garbage.
I did get my mind changed on USB-C DACs by way of inductive charging. Using an USB-C DAC and still being able to inductively charge seems at least somewaht reasonable to me.
On the newest round of phones for my wife and me I've tried to make sure we're inductively charging >90% of the time.
Need to dig deeper into inductive charging as it seems to heat the battery more especially if the phone is in a case. So yet another tradeoff to consider.
Good thing is that if the port goes bad it can still be charged.
Easy. You can't charge and listen to your headphones at the same time.
I've never understood spending more than that on a phone anyway, you can't exactly use all that processing power on a phone operating system. Unfortunately some of the bad features from expensive phones have been moving down to the cheaper ones, like the destroyed screen that's missing its corners and has a hole for the camera in it for some reason.
A 32 MP+ point-and-shoot starts at about $40, though goes up from there (to several thousand dollars for top models). As a bonus, it has an expected life far exceeding that of a smartphone.
1. Buy a non-crappy, dedicated, phone. Many of these feature better reception, voice quality, and battery life than a smartphone, as well as being smaller and lighter. Heck, smartphones are going this direction with satellite devices (earbuds, smart watches) already. Your "phone" is in your ear, most of the smarts stay in your pocket or bag.
2. A camera.
3. A full-fledged mobile device which is actually usable. Small form-factor laptop / hybrid beats pretty much any smartphone or tablet.
If all you need is the phone, that's what you carry. Much of the time you can carry other device(s) as well. My list would probably extend to a voice recorder. As with the camera, that's relatively inexpensive and long-lived, so you end up with less long-term expense.
My largest concern is camera quality: obviously it is Sony, but if you wouldn't mind, could you elaborate on their camera 'stack' a bit (esp. in relation to pixel phones if you have first hand experience...).
The Pixel 10's camera is unequivocally better. The JPEG outputs are processed, 'Instagram-ready'. The output from the Sony camera even in JPEG mode is considerably more muted, neutral, and has less contrast. Note that this is not representative of newer Xperias' camera quality; I've heard they have improved considerably. I'm not too concerned because I hardly use my phone to take photos; I have a Nikon mirrorless for that.
By a _substantial_ margin, because the best bang-for-your-buck strategy with smartphones for a long time has been to buy used or refurbished popular flagships for the last one or two years. As much as I like what Xperias are doing with a headphone jack and an SD card slot, the used market for them is almost non-existent. Even if you somehow manage to get a good deal, it will be even more difficult to find a good case and accessories like a reliable magnetic wallet, the market is just isn't there.
I myself have settled on using a Pixel with a headphone jack DAC dongle and an external hard drive.
Perhaps, but phones have become appliances. All my friends and family have held on to their smartphones for at least 5 years now.
It is some carrier configuration bullshit or something like that. There may be a way to make it work, but it did not look guaranteed after reading dozens of pages on forums on the topic. I ended up retuning the Sony I tried whilst I could still get a full refund.
Phones used to be exciting. Now it is just frustrating because all the good features are gone. Headphone jack, sd card, fingerprint sensor on back, unlockable bootloader.
AT&T and other GSM based carriers had sim cards on their phones and it was so much nicer.
Nobody has been able to convince me that esim is not just going back in time 15+ years. We moved to sim cards for a reason.
It's amazing if the phone for whatever reason doesn't work and that then requires a long customer support call that might not work. The direct phone-to-phone transfter the devices offer is also blocked on the carrier.
Another issue I had was (travel) eSIMs failing to provision because the carrier didn't whitelist my phone brand/model. The QR code was spent, my money gone and customer support nowhere to be found.
I've never had such issues with pSIMs in decade before. It's ridiculous.
So there's no CS path for lost/stolen/destroyed phones? That doesn't make sense, I'm sure it's a very frequent occurrence.
(The carrier is a M NO so they don't really have physical customer support either.)
I have 6 eSIMs on my iPhone, two are active. No stuffing about with swapping physical hardware just because I've temporarily relocated myself.
That said, I'm sympathetic to the stance of the article's author. I recently had a scare with my iPhone 13's battery not being able to charge (it recovered itself eventually) and I realized it was going to be a hassle to switch to another phone if I couldn't get the old one powered on enough to run the esim transfer, much less the whole OS migration.
Definitely made me feel that at the very least I should be getting a yubikey so that I can have authenticator codes across multiple devices.
And the T-Mobile Germany portal to download a new eSIM required authentication via SMS to that now deactivated number. That was fun. (As they didn’t have an alternative procedures to provision eSIMs in place, we had to go visit a store to get a new physical SIM first and could then convert that to eSIM.)
This seems like a "draw the rest of the owl" situation. If I arrive in a new country with no phone data (which is why I need a sim in the first place) then how do I download an app? Being able to walk up to a guy at the airport and within seconds slide in a SIM solves that data problem.
I can download T-Mobile eSIM from Australia - Pay them $15, know what my +1 USA number will be, all before leaving the country. You just can't do this with classical sims.
That's exactly the use case for which the carriers offer roaming plans. The bonus is that you (as in your phone number) get to remain connected and accessible by your contacts, as no other phone number is involved at any point. One should not need to change the SIM unless is about one's phone change.
well yeah, of course esim is shitty, as is everything imposed by big tech monopolies to their users without consulting or caring about what they really want. Did you think they were here for your wellbeing and not the money ?
They are impossible to transfer from device to device by design, for one. Every single "transfer" has to be approved and signed off by a cellular provider in an online mode. They can deny it at will, or just neglect implementing it, and you can do nothing at all.
It's pretty clear that when GSMA talks of "security", they mean "security of the business models". What does that mean for the users? It means they're getting fucked.
Bought a new phone. Now, to transfer my eSIM from the old phone to the new phone, I needed the carrier to approve. But I was away from my home country and on roaming. So I tried to call them. They needed me to use a verification PIN they would send via SMS on the old phone, to verify the transfer to the new one. Impossible since the old phone is unusable.
Back in the day, I'd have just taken out the sim from the old phone and moved it to the new one. Easy peasy.
The only other option in this case now was to visit one of their stores thousands of miles away. Eventually just ended up doing that when I returned weeks later but during this time I could not access several services due to lack of access to my number plus 2 factor codes being sent there.
Moving a sim from phone to phone was seamless. Now the carrier needs to approve this swap. Even with two working phones sometimes it's a hassle and there will be delays while carriers decide to approve the move. There is a new feature that allows you to transfer eSIMs easily between phones but carriers seem to be holding onto their power in this regard and not every carrier will let their sims move so easily. This possibly requires regulators to step in and solve the issue - make it up to the user to move eSIMs. I would count on the EU to make this easier at some point.
On the plus side, eSIMs are nice to be able to signup and provision them through an app. Helps with travel and roaming. So there's that too.
Why? Decode the QR code and store the text however you prefer to store text.
You could self-host Bitwarden/Vaultwarden, or something like that.
> don’t get me started on apple’s unpredictable model of sending 2fa to some other “trusted” device which means tou never know what tou need to bring with you.
I think they send 2FA to all supported devices on one's Apple account?
and also another situation in which the 2fa code would flash on the remote device and disappear in a fraction of a second. i eventually captured it with screen recording but every time i did it the code was not accepted.
my conclusion: apple had silently ruled that i would not be allowed to activate using that particular icloud account. no idea why. i tried a different one and things went through ok.
arbitrary power in practice.
The best option would be a software-only eSIM with full transfer support, IMO. But we don't have that, because GSMA says we can't have nice things.
Yep, I remember a time where you could extract the Ki and IMSI from legit SIMs and write that to a bog standard Goldwafer card (which were also used for cable TV hacking) including some SIM emulation software and thereby clone the SIM. That was like 30 years ago and the only thing that changed in SIMs since then is better encryption.
The obvious issue being: it's pretty hard to acquire raw key material. Most vendors refuse to sell it, and the workarounds are messy.
It wasn't the only reason, but was at least one of the stated reasons for the jack removal.
Once this phone needs updating, I’ll be swapping carrier to one that has regular SIM cards.
Meanwhile I just swapped boring old plastic card in a minute, while staying at home. I will stay away from esim for a while, maybe processes will mature in a few more years. At least until dual-sim phones are available.
Various people and the article have outlined some bad experiences but to give a contrasting example: Digital Republic, a local MVNO here in Switzerland, allows you to replace your eSIM by simply logging into their web portal with TOTP-based 2FA and clicking a button. No SMS, no contact with support, no reidentification.
In theory, all carriers could do this.
No QR code, only an iOS app which needs to be installed on the phone using the plan. My mum was visiting from abroad once and I had to download the app on her phone — which required me to first log into the App Store with my Dutch account.
Another app that could have been a QR code.
And it won't work if your phone is broken, while a regular SIM could still easily be removed.
Ended up switching to AT&T.
On the flip side, being able to have a primary I never change and a secondary that I swap out for international travel has proven to be extremely valuable to me. So you take the bad with the good.
Couldn’t set up easily because no wifi
then I just simply could not cancel the damn thing… It required being in Australia, and like the article needed a SMS code and the support was only contactable Australian working hours… who wanted the SMS code again.
So once back in Blighty there was no way… had to cancel the credit card to stop payments
So you are at the mercy of the competence of the provider
(Not that that doesn't suck; I'm just surprised at having a subscription in the first place.)
A "SIM" should just be a keypair. The subscriber use it to access the network.
So it’s more like: which network to connect to, keys, fallback network selection logic and tunnel logic to get authorisation on a non-home network
IIUC if the keypair was a certificate with a few other fields foreign networks could give you some basic communication with your provider and decided if you should be allowed to use this network and if/how to tunnel you back to the home network.
But the main point is that it should just be data that the user can port around to different devices as they see fit and that they can trust not to do malicious things.
It’s effectively multi-hop peer discovery and I don’t think you can encode the general case logic for it as just config.
Edit: as a (rather niche) example, FirstNet sims run a different applet to AT&T sims despite nominal running on the same network because they have special logic to use more networks if they are in an emergency area.
The apps are still on the VM.
But then on Sprint, they tried to copy the CDMA activation system on LTE whereas everyone else just used SIM cards directly. Sprint was very progressive on eSIM even if they were slow to VoLTE.
My Pixel 3 moved to a physical SIM due to switching to T-Mobile 3 months before the merger, and I've mostly used physical SIMs before the Pixel 10 Pro outside of international travel. I avoid MVNOs as my primary service because of the specter of eSIM-only phones, and that was pre-Pixel 10.
And yes, if my Pixel 10 Pro had a physical SIM card slot I'd use it.
Also, if I would drop my phone and break it I can simply remove the SIM and stick it in a backup phone. Can't do that with an esim either without the carrier cooperating.
Luckily all my current used phones still have two sim slots. It's something I select for but I'm sure eventually it will become harder.
Sure for a one month travel SIM it's super handy but I don't want it for my main number.
With physical sims, only your carrier has the encryption keys to be able to provision (and run e.g. a java program on the sim). With esims, that is not as tightly controlled. Coworker recommended I read about the "sim jacker" exploit, but I have not yet. If anyone is curious, I pass it along.
And I know what you might think: Isn't that defeating the purpose? No, it is not. I can recive a digital simcard activation, render it on a physical card and use it in any phone. Thats perfect.
And yes, once the phones without a sim-card slot come ... we'll see.
Its going to take congressional action before we can get rid of this menace. All we're doing is half-ass offloading credit and identity checks to cellphone carriers, which do this, and by having a cell phone, you've probably been through an identity and credit check.
Seems like most of the complaints in here re: eSIM are around how a specific carrier deals with it and less about the technology itself?
Many countries still sell iPhone 17 series with physical SIM slots.
Which plan is this? That sounds pretty awesome to have handy at all times. I'm assuming it's probably just 1GB or so though.
A$25 gets you 2GB for a year, there are beefier versions too.
You are always better off buying a local prepaid SIM at your destination airport.
I learned from this experience that maybe eSIM is a good idea and I switched immediately upon hearing this person's story. Did I miss something?
So changing phones can be done without any customer support or web forms or calls to service provider etc.
Actually, every phone I ever had eventually got replaced this way, I am still using the original sim card from years ago.
Except many carriers have you jump through hoops to activate an eSIM on a new device. Here in the comments one person has to receive a new QR over snail mail.
For me it was 10 mins through my provider's app (and I was also doing it internationally)
What verification processes did you have to go through?
If it's simple username/password, that could mean that your number could be trivially hijacked by a determined enough attacker.
As another anecdotal data point, I was able to switch phones internationally using a physical SIM by just putting it in the new phone.
Neither SIM nor eSIM would have helped.
In that case, I waited to get home (I didn't live in Illinois) and got a new SIM by mail.
Are you sure that his carrier allows activating an eSIM while roaming? Mine definitely doesn't, which means that if I break my phone while abroad, I lose access to online banking.
3G made web browsing viable. 4G made streaming video viable. I haven't seen any new applications enabled by 5G on end-user smartphones.
This made me laugh.
I was even offered paperclips to keep at airport SIM counters before.
Personally I chose to purchase phones with physical sim card and microsd slots.
My father recently had a problem w/ the phone showing SIM-related error messages. He called the carrier and they "helpfully" switched him to an eSIM.
The best laid plans... >sigh<
If I can’t take my esim away from a phone and plug it to another one as easy as physical sim - there is zero point in having this bullshit. Just link my cell plan to IMEI or something.
It's nice to know that you're on a telco that supports "eSIM Quick Transfer", but that's still a feature that telcos need to explicitly support.
I guess maybe they're worse for professional phone reviewers, who switch phones all the time, but I'm not one. In my experience, I think about two-thirds of the time I've gotten a new phone and wanted to switch to it, the SIM card size had changed, so I needed to get a new one anyways, which could only be done by mail order, so took a few more days. And about half of the time the same SIM card did physically fit, something else went wrong, like the APN names wrong, carrier didn't want to let it activate, RCS failed to work, all of which are virtually impossible to troubleshoot. IMO, the dream of universal SIM card portability has been dead for at least a decade, if not longer, and started long before eSIMs came out.
The eSIM on my current phone Just Worked as far as activating. I haven't tried switching to a new phone with it yet, so I guess I'll have to see how well it works when that happens.
Clearly there are cases when both are better. eSIMs are nice for being able to switch carriers immediately, get set up in a new country you're visiting smoothly, and recover the number from a physically lost phone. Physical SIMs are nice if you want to try out a different phone model, assuming they support the same SIM size and you can find the little tool. And also if your phone is seriously damaged but not physically lost. So not everyone necessarily loves them, but I don't think it's a case of the big bad big tech companies are enshittifying everything.