The alternatives are generally far better than email, which is why normal people (and most of us) get so little email these days. My email accounts have more life as a transaction recording system for online shopping than they do for interpersonal communication. Email has largely been superseded. That alarms nerds like us, the way it alarmed people when HTTP superseded purpose-built network protocols, but there is a losing side of this argument, and it's the side that is still using Mutt.

If you are concerned about digital document signing, then that is a different use case from the OP who speaks of encryption and being “[not] safe from state-sponsored hackers”. For digital signing, business sectors like e.g. banking rely on PDF e-signatures[0], not PGP.

[0] https://www.adobe.com/sign/hub/how-to/how-banks-use-electron...

"digital signing" in banking sector means something completely different than PGP-like "digital signing". PGP-like digital signatures can be applied on any document and file and you can easily validate the author by their public key and can't be easily forged.

Your post said “documents, images, and invoices” and “business”. In the real world, documents and invoices in business are overwhelmingly sent in PDF format. Even images get embedded in PDFs a lot of the time. PDF e-signatures can be validated, the technology is based on very standard crypto with FOSS implementations. Fine if you have a different workflow that requires PGP, but most people clearly don’t feel it is impossible to “do business” otherwise.

> In the real world, documents and invoices in business are overwhelmingly sent in PDF format

This is evasive and dismissive. When your parent is talking about the issue, there's a good chance he is already using it. Telling him what "the real world" does is irrelevant. He has a use case already, and needs a solution for his use case, not for the rest of the world.

Almost every time on HN that there is a discussion of changes in technology that experts would argue are overall good, there is always someone who says “But that would break my use case!” This even got lampooned at xkcd[0]. OK, I understand that he finds this trend vexing. But no party to this discussion is obliged to spend their time and effort on suggesting a solution, especially when we don’t know his specifics and our suggestion might simply be rejected out of hand.

[0] https://xkcd.com/1172/

Except when it comes to GnuPG, you have to realize:

1. Many, many people used it, and continue to do so.

2. The anti GnuPG crowd keeps coming and touting alternatives, and then complain when the people in the prior bullet point out the impracticality of the alternatives for their use case.

We get that GnuPG has issues. We get that sometimes the alternatives are better. We can coexist with them. People simply don't understand that for a number of tasks, GnuPG is totally appropriate, and solves the problem with little pain.

> In the real world, documents and invoices in business are overwhelmingly sent in PDF format

In your real world, probably. In actual real world, people use MS Word/Excel (or LibreOffice) and images a lot, beside PDF. Good luck using e-signatures with that :)