What do they use instead?
For signing: signify/minisign
For encryption: age
For file transfer: magic wormhole
For encrypted messaging: Signal (or your choice of e2e encrypted messaging platform)
How do you trust some key material. The WoT is a complete failure, but modern solutions like WKD are amazing and make PGP just plain work.
The one nice thing about age is the ability to encrypt to a GitHub users key. However, even that is possible with OpenPGP. Here is a tool that I made ~7 years ago that does something similar: https://github.com/georgyo/sshcrypt
Another thing minisign/age don't have is a method to say that a key is compromised.
I don't think the solution to the problems with OpenPGP is too just ignore the problems and switch to using bare keys like new tools are doing.
How would signal be compromised that email could not and which signal is not better prepared for?
I don't follow. Not everyone uses Gmail or the big email providers.
Right now that sits at about a 1 in 5 chance for Gmail alone.
Here is an example of a cool tool with modern cryptography, forward secret etc, often recommended in HN as an alternative to Wormhole:
https://redrocket.club/posts/croc/
It turned out that plaintext could easily be recovered! One mistake and 100% broken.
There are benefits to an industry standard protocol.
They recommended Brian Warner's magic-wormhole, Signal, Tarsnap, age, Signify, Minisign, libsodium.
The only valid criticism is about its handling of corrupted data, but for that too you can use an external tool like PAR2 to generate recovery data. I do this with my GPG backups and other data as well.
I like that age follows the Unix "do one thing well" philosophy, and that I can use other similarly scoped tools for other features. There are still some things I'm missing, but these are slowly being worked on[1,2].
I was responding to a comment that said that age was a "standard replacement" for GPG.
* https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgpfan:agevspgp
Age might be such a replacement some day for just the encryption function. But it has a ways to go. Actually defining the format would be a good first step.