> Outside of the academic world decimals are almost always a better solution

Is “academic world” now a shorthand for “all numerical computing”?

Decimals basically never make sense, except possibly in some calculations related to money. Those make up a minuscule part of modern computer use.

Maybe decimals are also better for homework assignments for schoolchildren?

The type of applications where decimals are useful are by and large insensitive to compute speed and need no special hardware support. You can easily write your code for decimal arithmetic on top of integer arithmetic hardware.

Those of us who need binary floating point for graphics, audio, games, engineering, science, .... won’t stop you.