It should have never been a cloud password manager play. It should be hardware device only, and tied to the device. One passkey on each hardware device.
Then most of us would never use it. That means either:
- Only one specific device can ever login (bad).
- It doesn't limit login to one specific device, therefore it does nothing.
Linking Passkeys to a physical device was always DoA. At least not without a way to enroll every device you own, and strong recovery strategies. But considering how inconsistent every company's Passkey implementation is (inc. many that only allow ONE TOTAL!), it is DoA.
Then I wouldn't use it, and I would probably stop using services that tried to push me in to it.
I use multiple devices and I want to log in to things using only my master password. I also want to be able to back up my credentials to local encrypted storage so I can restore them if my password manager service provider stops operating or becomes untenable.
That leads to the cross-device usability issues from the original post. Even for an experienced engineer, it's a headache to manage multiple devices across multiple sites.
With the "cloud password manager" angle there is some hope of being user friendly, although we're certainly not there yet for most folks.