I have 6 eSIMs on my iPhone, two are active. No stuffing about with swapping physical hardware just because I've temporarily relocated myself.
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 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.)
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.