We've got millions of people losing their keys
Did you know the keys owned by exchanges and other centralized platforms will be difficult to be lost? Did you know these centralized platforms controls huge amount of Bitcoin in which millions or billions of people are making use of them (I am not implying decentralized wallets is not the best, decentralized wallets and exchanges are the best for total control of funds and privacy reasons). Also know that there are many people that are very careful and with Bitcoin valuation, they will safely keep backup their seep phrase (and passphrase if the seed phrase is extended with extract words). Do not just think people will be losing Bitcoin like that, many of the losses can be traced to people that did not believe the price of bitcoin can increase significantly, the more the price increase, the more these people will want to recover back the lost Bitcoin, unlike now that people really appreciate what Bitcoin is.
We've got guys like John McAfee dying, maybe with thousands of coins locked up forever
How did you know thousands are lost forever due to McAfee's death, if no evidence, you can not yet make such comment. There are ways to make hires recover the Bitcoin someone has after the person die. The first is by letting your hires have vast knowledge about Bitcoin, to know about seed phrase, private key and privacy. Then someone can deploy different tactics like Shamir secret sharing, multisig wallet, time-lock smart contract and the likes. Careful people have higher probability of never losing bitcoin they inherited, while the person that died if careful, he or she will take full precaution that will not lead to hires losing the coins.
How does this not end up where a very small group of whales own the majority of coins and the rest own a miniscule amount of sats, and/or progressively more and more get lost throughout time?
Although, there are many whales but Bitcoin is still well distributed in the world, this should not ba a concern.
Bitcoin is 12 years old and some say 6 million coins are lost at a guess.. The fact they are gone forever, to me suggests that this cannot be 'the future of money', as more and more will continue to be lost each year.
Let me explain about demand and supply for you. The higher the damand the higher the price, the lower the demand the lower the price. The lower the supply the higher the price, the higher the supply the lower the price. If the supply in circulation is reduced, this will lead to increase in the price of bitcoin, this will only lead to increase in price while it will become scarce to buy.