This is of course because in 2021 an overwhelming number of consumers are finally pushing for crypto currency payments.... /s

Seriously though, if speculative assets are your thing then crypto is great. It's still not great for the average consumer to use for payments.

Change happens quick. We all started relying on smartphones seemingly overnight.

Bitcoin is 13 years old.

There is hope that the move to Proof Of Stake and the arrival of various scaling solutions for Ethereum will finally make crypto payments simpler (2022 - 2023 implementation time frame).

Here is a short blog post that discusses this tech: https://polynya.medium.com/argent-zksync-a-peer-to-peer-elec...

I think the other big issue is that current wallet apps are very buggy and their UX sucks in general, so your point still stands

Experimenting with my money is not something I'd appreciate.

Then again, perhaps it's just me.

Is it really that limiting though? I know lots of people in and out of tech who have heard the word bitcoin or cryptocurrency and at most 2 people who have ever made or been interested in making a transaction. Obviously anecdata, but it doesnt seem to me like the amount of engineering effort vs actual users doesnt seem like an actually good tradeoff to me.

It also limits their exposure to scams and customers trying to do chargebacks using non-reversible payment methods.

That's not a plus for the consumer and won't do much to enhance customer adoption and preference for the payment method.

Last time people said this ( 2017), there weren't much payments in practice.

I don't think anything changed. They added support for crypto in the past and removed later on too, similar to a couple of years ago ( eg. Steam, Amazon, ... ).