In Poland there is BLIK where you enter a 6-digit number from your banking app and then confirm the operation there. It's available everywhere (Steam/Apple/local merchants) and works reliably. I'd say it's much more cumbersome than just using Apple Pay (you have to switch to another app twice, copy-paste etc.), but it's a no-brainer to use, as one could make a point that pasting credit card details from Chrome/1Password has actually less friction. So the issue is in actually providing your credit card data, that's the real problem that the author tries to describe.

I not using Aplle pay but I think since platforms like Stripe make enabling Apple Pay a simple setting, merchants who skip it are really just choosing to lose customers to competitors who value user time.