There's a lot of food for thought there and I can actually get on board with a lot of what you said. I enjoyed your perspective at the very least. I too have been a part of some tough audits, fedRAMP, etc. I've worked on apps that regularly get pen-tested. XSS is real, though more often I've seen ITOR issues. No need to worry about being hacked when you're giving it away for free. And then there were at least four OWASP courses I've been asked to do for work.

I'm not quite to the point of never wanting to own another user table with a password column. Maybe I will be someday. Yes, it's a liability but I still think my table (which lives on RDS or Aurora btw) is less of a target than Okta's users tables, which were breached earlier this year. BTW, Auth0 was recently acquired by Okta.

But yeah, if I was spinning up a large-scale, enterprise-level web app, I'd probably tell my stakeholders we were going with AWS Cognito or something, just to offset liability. Never mind, I'm still going to have to have a users table, and if I'm using Cognito for authorization (group-level authorizers) then god help me (check out their limits on those custom fields too). And btw, they use JWT, and their front-end solution Amplify still uses local storage to hold credentials. And it's going to be even more difficult to set up the basic auth flow than if I rolled it myself, but who cares, as soon as the execs hear AWS solution or cloud-native, they nod and feel assured. After all, the liability is now somewhere else as you said. Never mind there's a host of missteps and other ways you could still mess it up on your side of the fence there.

For all of my personal projects, a few smaller paid side-projects, and at least two enterprise-level products, I've rolled my own and owned the DB and it's felt much better to me than the alternatives I've had to face when I forced into some auth as a service solution. I've done auth0 twice (never again). Firebase once. Cognito at least 4 times. I still prefer to roll my own. Maybe I am a masochist. Maybe I've been lucky. Maybe I just go against the grain and do things my own way, providing less of a common attack vector.

The number of devs I've run across who don't even understand the basics of authentication has surprised me. Yes, it's seemingly easy in concept as you say, to "just bcrypt it" but it astounds the number of devs I've come across or worked with who didn't even understand what that was or what it looked like. Then we have the "company-sponsored blogs" and the echo chamber of people throwing down absolutes of "whatever you do, never roll your own", "you don't understand how hard Auth is", etc...

But I'm coming to accept that maybe I'm in the minority on this topic so I'll stop ranting for now. I suspect that a lot of us on this thread are speculating or speaking from different scenarios and experiences, like a sysadmin or IT head, vs legacy enterprise apps, vs mobile, front-end specific SPA's with stateless auth, vs server-rendered stateful, session-based web apps, etc...

In any case I appreciate you taking the time to map out your thoughts and perspective in detail and I think it's probably broadened my own thoughts on the subject.