There isn't encryption involved? I mean how can you use public and private keys without encryption?

Anyways yes, I agree otherwise. That said for all intents and purposes, the private key is a password. It’s the thing you store that gives you access to the service. That it’s not transmitted, but instead the whole public key / challenge response dance is done, is IMO sufficiently well summarized as “well, it’s a special kind of autogenerated password, which can’t be insecurely transmitted or badly stored by the service”.

If we really want people to adopt passkeys we gotta begin talking about them in terms people understand. I consider myself pretty tech savvy and it took me like 6 articles until I finally grokked that a passkey is just an autogenerated password (plus some free automatic bonus security that doesn’t affect my UX)