[hyper_reality]

Absolutely right, the essay writes from a comfortable UK perspective and ignores large amounts of the world where well-regulated, trustworthy financial institutions aren't available. And even UK banks aren't immune from failure or just mistakes which can freeze people's savings and put them in terrible situations that take months to resolve.

To add to your counterpoint, the OP's praise of going cashless as opposed to the problems of cash is another fine example. It's certainly more convenient to use your card everywhere, but if everyone did it then just a handful of payment processors would gain immense power, with the ability to track, monitor, and censor all transactions. Plenty of dystopian fiction like The Handmaid's Tale covers what can happen when this infrastructure is abused. Cash may have problems but it plays an important role in an open society, and redundancy when a major payment network goes down (as Visa did across Europe on 1st June 2018, causing retail chaos). But many vendors no longer accept cash and this will only accelerate as more people never use it. In praising going cashless as protecting ourselves from being our own banks, the OP misses the forest for the trees.