Your blaming “cashback” seemingly betrays an ignorance about how the whole idea of cashback developed.
Generally, not specifically, or in every case:
Charge and credit cards and their associated xaction fees have been around fo more than 50 years, for most of that time these fees have been baked in.
For less than half that time have there been cashback cards.
As cards proliferated from banks to credit unions to cobranded merchant cards, and became increasingly popular, the competition to acquire and retain a customer or cardholder looked for innovative methods to do this some offered restrictive closed-system points, others cut through this by eliminating cumbersome point redemption programs and offering time/amount restricted cash rewards, and finally near immediate direct cash to customer rewards.
A credit card like the Apple Card, properly used (like any other), ie balanced paid of when due, is not only more secure than all other forms of payment, but allows a user to recover a large portion of the xaction fees.
In addition users benefit from supplemental programs like warranty extensions, travel protections, car rental insurance, etc., as well as providing a positive data point input to an individual’s FICO score, where high FICO is beneficial for cheaper mortgages, car loans, insurance rates, and job candidate evaluation (ie higher FICO means lower risk premium for borrowers and acts as a proxy for more reliable employees.)
Anybody acting as a credit card Luddite viewing them through the narrow lens of paying at the til or smearing the smart home finance move of capturing the largest part of the transaction fees via cashback (as opposed to avoiding card use and letting merchants keep the fee margin) has some self defeating ideas.
