Considering cryptocurrency seemed to originally be a rejection of the traditional banking system, wherein you put your savings in someone else's hands, and instead having your own secured "wallet" that is always securely in your own hands... it always confuses me a little bit at how quickly the crypto space lunged headlong into essentially recreating banks and once again having large numbers of people put their savings in someone else's hands instead of having personal control over their finance.

Are hardware wallets that difficult and/or expensive? Or am I missing something that crypto exchanges offer that I am fundamentally misunderstanding? Because it seems like this keeps happening with these exchanges and that these were the kind of things crypto was supposed to be preventing, not doing.