Progress for the sake of progress... SIM cards have plenty of advantages, all of which relate to control of your hardware. With a physical SIM card you retain control of the number and can swap it easily. As other comments have shown, with an eSIM, you rely on the provider to provision it for you.

I hated having to call the provider when I was with Sprint and Verizon Wireless in the US, when I wanted to change the phone I was using. And that was mostly free and they had 24-hour hotlines. If you have to pay and can only call during business hours, it is a huge regression.

One I can think of is operator providing you a software package to make use of his special services (and whatnot).

Did you know your simcard contains Java Runtime Environment?

many advantages, If your phone dies, you just move sim card and the new phone works has your old phone number.

You buy a new phone, say you have an android and buy an iphone or reverse... you can easily move the sim card as you want. I'm not even sure how you would do that with eSIM.

Yes, so you can switch providers easily

Couple of years ago I went to Africa, bought two local SIM cards from children on the road while sitting in a car, they had to take a picture of my passport with their mobile phone and activate the cards, but it worked. Having esim being sold like that would probably not be possible.

In some countries eSIM is basically illegal (for example in Russia up until 2019)

China still doesn't allow eSim, so Apple made special iPhone model with dual SIM slots for them.