[cbsmith]

Well, there's encryption algorithms, and then there's authentication methods... Don't confuse the two. There's actually been a lot of interesting developments in authentication methods... not the least of which have been the FIDO 2.0/WebAuthn standards. While you might perceive them as plays by Big Tech, smaller companies like Yubikey are kind of at the core of it, and without WebAuthn in particular, it was rather hard to have confidence in browser based authentication. Yes, there were certificates, but the general public has struggled to understand and adopt device certificates in a way that doesn't lead to them being stolen.