The thing that strikes me as ridiculous is that in the US on CDMA carriers, there was the exact same thing as "eSIMs" for years. You had to beg and plead with your carrier to set up and provision your phone, since there was no physical SIM.

So for Apple to pitch this as "wow, it's a new system where instead of just putting in a sim card you have to grovel to your carrier to set up your phone", it hardly strikes me as better UX.