There was plenty of wailing and gnashing of teeth when Apple announced the iPhone 14 was eSIM only last year. Apple’s presentation made it sound incredibly convenient that everything would just happen digitally and you wouldn’t have to worry about SIM tools or a physical card anymore, it’ll just work! But to quote Dr. Suess “Except when they don’t. Because, sometimes they won’t.”
In that case, oh the places you’ll go is your carrier’s store or waiting on hold for customer service and see if they can help you over the phone (assuming you have another working phone). Now if something goes wrong with a physical SIM card that is a trip to the carrier store too, but in roughly 15 years of owning phones that use SIM cards I have yet to experience that. The crux of the problem for eSIM is on activation and if anything happens to go awry on the backend of your account.
