It has virtually no adoption. Every modern secure messenger application sends encrypts more messages, and between more pairs of people, than OpenPGP has in its entire lifetime.
Messaging and email are different applications. People use messaging apps because of the rise of the mobile devices, not because these messaging apps use forward secrecy or ECC. Don’t try to link that adoption to crypto protocols!
Also, very few of these users actually use secure versions such as signal or wire. They all happily post on Facebook‘s messenger and WhatsApp and don’t care about crypto.
Messaging applications use protocols derived from Signal Protocol rather than PGP because they had the opportunity to do something better than PGP. The first secure messengers did use PGP; designing a new messenger based on PGP would be malpractice.
WhatsApp uses Signal Protocol, and protects many order of magnitude more messages every day --- or, if you like, bytes of plaintext --- than PGP ever has or will.
Email not being a messaging protocol is... a take.
That article was actually the motivation behind my serious of PGP fan articles. I wondered what the opposite would look like, completely partisan, rabidly pro-PGP:
They would not; you're either drastically underestimating the number of messages modern secure messengers handle, or overestimating the number of packages verified every day. But PGP is also an archaic way to sign packages, and there is no network effect to package signature schemes; all of them can, and should, be replaced with modern schemes like minisign/signify.
Our disagreement here is on your claim that PGP has virtually no adoption. I brought up the monstrous amount of packages that get verified by CI/containers/OSs as an example where PGP is widely adopted. No one is claiming that dedicated tools can't do the job better.
People use PGP because it is standard, widely-adopted, and does what people need it to do. From where I'm standing, people who argue against these three facts are underestimating PGP or overestimating their own favored solutions.
No, people use PGP because at the times these systems were designed, there weren't better options; in some cases, there literally wasn't materially better cryptography, and in others, the better cryptography wasn't suitably enabled by good libraries. None of that is true anymore, nobody should be using the archaic PGP format for anything new, and, in most cases, people should be investigating how to replace PGP with modern alternatives.
This discussion was about your false assertion that PGP "has virtually no adoption".
If you want to change our discussion to be about replacing PGP instead, then I completely agree that people should replace PGP with modern properly-standardized alternatives if such exist.
https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html