I wonder how many of the criticisms would exist in a world where PGP moved to its own channel, and stopped riding on email.

I use PGP outside of email all the time (you should too). You can PGP encrypt sensitive files (passwords, finances, etc.) to your PGP key and the PGP keys of your family members and upload them to shared Google and MS O365 folders.

For important, sensitive data that you need to access and keep confidential, PGP is great. Nothing else really comes close (despite all the criticisms).

0: https://github.com/FiloSottile/age