Now you don’t have to trust the other customers, only the bar you’re at, their ISP and a million other parties between you and the site you’re visiting.

That's a reasonable point, but I'm speaking from the perspective of the bar owner - I feel I have a duty to provide better security even if the patrons have no reason to trust me.

Like a bar is going to run account administration.. at most they’re going to set a proper password with WPA2-PSK which provides protection against outsiders. But it can’t provide protection against an active attacker that has the password.

You could have a wifi access product that used a voucher system. The code could be on the bar receipt.

They're probably also not putting up a captive portal, so what's your point?

Using WPA-Enterprise, as I understand it, requires devices to be preconfigured to authenticate with the radius server, which makes it a non-starter for the kinds of networks that use a captive portal.

No, there's no preconfiguration needed, it's just a username/password account. You choose the network, then the OS asks you for your user/pass, then you're connected.

It's the router that connects to the RADIUS server, not the device directly. And some routers have one embedded, so you don't even need to configure that, it "just works".