I switched to carrying a small front pocket wallet (basically a business card holder) a while back. It lets me have some bills for the odd vendor (e.g. food cart) that doesn't want to take a card for a small purchase and a few other things like ID that I like to have on me. In general, like paper boarding passes when they're convenient to print out I just find it easier to use a physical artifact rather than fumbling with my phone or watch. But I'm happy to admit that may be largely habit. Certainly in circumstances where carrying anything in a pocket was inconvenient, I can see using a watch.

We just moved into a WeWork office in Shoreditch and I am genuinely very annoyed that I now have to carry a building entry pass in the form of a card. I've spent years trying to shed all my cards and now I'm back to having to carry a wallet.

I was in a WeWork the other day, and saw somebody tap their phone to get entry to the office. I was amazed, assuming they had rolled out some new system that used phones for access. Nope—she just had her access card stuck inside her phone case.

That really is annoying. Apple has APIs for adding door keys / office passes to the NFC wallet. WeWork could fix this if they wanted to.

I wonder if there’s a way to clone cards to digitize them (using 3rd party hardware readers and these APIs maybe?)

This is definitely possible with things like a Flipper Zero, but I doubt adding the cloned card to Apple Wallet is possible on iPhones (though I imagine Androids have no such restriction)