In India, even rural farmers have easy cashless mobile payments. In D.C., the capital of the US, nobody has easy cashless mobile payments, and even card payments are too difficult, with the government finally giving up and enshrining cash.
In my country, we have a similar system like in India (in fact, we copied it from them) and I've experienced this situation: a government-run gas company mistakenly claimed I owe them money, and the bank withdrew the claimed amount without due process, because they have some sort of mutual agreement that all their claims are legit unless I bring the issue to court. I won and they had to return the money.
The government can't just take away all your cash on a whim without any notice. That's why, I guess, some people prefer cash. If you want to use cash, you want local shops to accept cash. Personally, I'm OK with being cashless.
Funnily enough, India did something similar to that - they overnight made 500 & 1000 rupee bills (the two highest value denomination - approx ~8 & 16USD at the time) illegitimate. There were ways to convert those to the new bills, slowly, and capped at a certain amount iirc.
The goal was to "make illegal money" (i.e. tax evasion / sourced from corruption) useless.
India and China use cheap QR code transactions, but a lot of the overhead is taken in by VC money. So I think these companies are hoping to make money on these someday, just not right now.
The USA has a pretty well developed system, and debit and credit cards have been pretty ubiquitous for a few decades now. The issue is that our system is expensive, and no one is subsidizing it for future gains (the gains are today). Debit cards are cheaper, but credit cards have done some marketing to get people to prefer them.
