When you drop your iPhone on the floor and it shutters, how exactly are you going to get to your SMS 2FAs?

The point of SIM is that you can transfer service to another handset without talking to anyone. Which is invaluable, for example, when you travel in the foreign country and your iPhone dies from water damage, albeit being advertised as “waterproof”.

The same example also goes into the opposite direction: Let's assume your phone gets stolen in a foreign country: With a regular SIM card I lost my phone service for the remainder of the trip. With an eSIM I can buy another phone (that supports eSIMs) and login to the website of my provider to download a new eSIM. Problem solved.

but it could _trivially_ support 8 eSims _and_ at least one physical SIMs for like a few cents of additional production cost and basically no cost for maintenance because that is already supported in some places anyway.