Annuities are great (if administered effectively, which is helped by economies of scale).

The UK has an efficient annuities market, it seems to me. My understanding was that in the US, it was to a large extent a tax-avoidance scheme, rather than a risk-mitigation mechanism, but I don't know enough about it.

In addition to regular vanilla annuities, for which we have a pretty efficient market, we have these terrible, awful, no good products that are misleadingly called variable annuities.

The variable ones are far more profitable and so get pushed onto people while you need to go seek out someone to sell you an ordinary annuity. They have a deservedly terrible reputation which I fear has tainted the ordinary kind somewhat in the public mind.