As European who lived in the US for a while, I'm still baffled about the lax concept of paying off debt on (multiple) credit cards, vs. the strict monthly, limited and unavoidable debit from one's checking account.
It's all about cash flow. That has a huge value depending on your personal situation. But for a lot of poorer folks (and some wealthier ones with poor habits) it's just a way to temporarily spend more than you make. That's not a good use for credit cards, of course.
The superior protection of your assets from fraud is icing on the cake.
It varies by person, but if you are moderately responsible and have a budget or at least a good handle on your monthly income you would be stupid to not, say, buy things using Apple Card (just an example) with Apple Pay for 2% daily cash back. In addition, if someone swipes your debit card and steals the money from your account you are screwed. If someone swipes your credit card you just get a new card and nothing bad happens to you. You also have protections from bad sellers/merchants through chargeback mechanisms.
You just use the credit card as the debit card and you are good to go. Certainly not everyone can handle that and there's probably a society-wide problem here but that doesn't detract from the individual decision to be made in the operating environment.
Using debit-only can backfire on you, I did this for years and when I went to buy a house, banks were like, you have no credit. I was confused because I had various utility bills and they showed up on my credit report, and I had a score from those. But for house loans they ignore those, and only look at credit cards and actual loans, which I had none of. So I had to get a credit card and put off buying a house for a year until I could build the credit they were looking for.
Turns out it was pointless since I was self-employed they wouldn't give me a mortgage anyway (wish they had mentioned that up front, but they didn't). Ended up buying a small house with savings, which really hurt my future wealth, but oh well.
