I find the timing interesting because coincidentally I'm having an issue with Stripe. I'm finding recently on multiple PCs that all Stripe checkouts are giving me a generic-sounding error ("We are unable to authenticate your payment method. Please choose a different payment method and try again.") no matter what credit card I use or whether or not uBlock Origin is turned on for the checkout site. However for some reason, I can still pay "unpaid invoices" through Stripe. When I complained to Stripe, I found that the support folks are not empowered to deal directly with any end-user customers on any technical issues, so it has to be done as a game of telephone through individual merchants, even though from my perspective it's a systematic problem with Stripe itself. This sounds like a lot of work to push the issue through support staff at merchants who may or may not be equipped to deal with more technically focused issues and may also be overloaded with other issues to deal with.

I did my own research and found that there could be a problem with 3D Secure and since I was not prompted about 3D Secure during checkout, that may very well be part of the problem. But since there are no visible unique ID numbers associated with these failures, I don't have any logs to pass up to support, it's all up to the merchant to dig through their Stripe account and look for the relevant info, etc. For one of the payments I had to make, I just used PayPal instead since I noticed that it happened to be another option. That's also a common pattern - everyone has to dual-home their payment processors or else a tremendous amount of "legitimate customers with money are being denied" risk is occupying one bucket.

Sadly, this is a user experience that I find typical of just about any online payment processing flows. I keep wondering, why is payment processing always so terrible?