I don't need to carry around my seed phrase backups, though. They are in safe locations.
You don't need to care physical seed phrase backup, but you are doing it in digital form inside secure element.
I agree with you that Krux is not very good as a portable device, but it's good enough as a part of multisig setup and to use it at home.
Meanwhile a hardware wallet with secure element can also be left in a less secure location where it is quickly and easily accessible.
That is fine until someone exploits that secure element, and we already saw that many secure elements are not secure anymore, including ATECC608A that is used in Passport, OneKey, Cypherock, ColdCard Mk3...
While a quick picture of the QR gives the attacker full access, as well as the ability to stay unnoticed, hacking a Passport (or similar) requires it to be gone for hours (to attempt an intensive hardware attack). You are much more likely to notice that.
Good passphrase and multisig solves this problem very easy.
That's what passphrases are for. You can also write your seed in different ways, formats, number bases, encodings, encrypted, but sure this is not for everyone. Most people should just trust companies and go with mainstream solutions.
Krux has a supporting role in sovereign strategy, it's a Swiss army knife for create and load seeds in a variety of forms and to sign PSBTs and messages, it requiring less trust.
Do you think it would be possible to have some alternative firmware option for Krux similar like Jade wallet is using with third party server?