> allow for … digital payments that are, in my opinion, an order of magnitude easier to use than PayPal, etc.

Genuine question, what friction do you experience with PayPal that is so bad that something can become an order of magnitude easier? I use a password manager to fill in my PayPal creds if I want to pay with PayPal and it is very easy for me.

I don't use a password manager, so I'm a bit at a disadvantage but, from what little I remember from others, the password manager basically lets you look up a password, put the username and password into a buffer so that you can cut and paste it. Not to mention that different password managers have different interfaces and interactions.

It's "easy" for me too, in the sense that I can just lookup the credentials I need to fill it in. The wallet extension allows for a more 'integrated' approach, where the website communicates to the web extension via some standardized interface (or some semblance thereof) to authenticate and authorize.

The point I'm making is that it's not about feasibility, it's about friction. These wallets allow for an experience with much less friction.

I notice a pattern when new technology like this comes around. There's a contingent of people who are used to the old system and they say "works for me" without understanding how much a barrier to entry the system they're using is.

As an experiment, try opening up an 'incognito' window and signing up for GMail, Twitter, Facebook or any of the other services (even trying to establish an account here on HN) without using your bank, your phone number or another email address. Now install a wallet extension (Temple, say) and try and log into one of the websites mentioned (fxhash.xyz, versum.xyz, objkt.com). This is a bit of an apples-to-oranges test as those services are for a different market, but hopefully you should get a sense for just how much easier it is to use those services, how much more integrated it is and what they're trying to accomplish.

Put another way, 'web3' wallets are doing what OAuth promised but couldn't fulfill. If we used one monolithic centralized service, like PayPal or GMail, then maybe these integration issues would disappear but since we have a variety of platforms, in my opinion, the only way to get "persistent" identity across platforms is to have something like a decentralized network and/or monetary system.