> The vast majority of users aren't going to have their laptop stolen by the CIA/NSA and have their DIMMs popped and cryofreezed.
That's kind of the point. The vast majority of users aren't going to have their laptop stolen at all, if they do it will 99% of the time be by someone who only wants to wipe it and fence it, and attempts to access data are most likely to be by unsophisticated family members who would be defeated by a simple password without any TPM.
Meanwhile there have been plenty of TPM vulnerabilities that don't require anything so esoteric and can often be attacked purely from software, so if a normal user was facing even so much as someone willing to watch some security conference talks, they're going to lose regardless. If the TPM doesn't make them more vulnerable to that, because it contains the secrets and is susceptible to attack, vs. FDE with a boot key stored in some cloud service secured with the user's password instead of a TPM, which can then rate limit attempts without being susceptible to physical access attacks and be revoked if the device is stolen.
Moreover, the more common threat to normal users is data loss, in which case you only want your laptop to be secure against your unsophisticated nephew and not the tech you want to recover your data after you forget your password.
> In as much as there are attacks against SMS 2FA, but for the vast majority of people, SMS 2FA is an acceptable level of security.
The current recommendation seems to be against SMS 2FA because the security of SMS really is that bad, so if you need 2FA, use an authenticator app or similar.
> FDE (w/ TPM) is part of defense-in-depth.
Any snake oil can be painted as defense-in-depth.