Realistically, at the time when HW started to become a serious competitor to desktop wallets, there were not too many choices, and Ledger mainly imposed itself as the main player on the market due to its design.
I don't know much about the history of HWs, only cloudy memories that there was a time when there were basically only Trezor and Ledger as serious products. But then again you had Ledger with its black box model and Trezor with much more transparency, albeit with possibly an inferior security design.
I can't tell what I would've chosen back then. After all this Ledger circus and drama in the past few years for me there's one irrefutable paradigm when it comes to manage safely higher values (low four-digit and up in $/€): the wallet (software or hardware) has to be transparent and open-source. Ledger is then by default not a choice and I wonder why so many users don't care, especially when there are more choices today then ever.
Ledger and Trezor were the only two products that were publicly available through public interest. But the laser's black box model created an identity, which is not supposed to be somewhat transparent. Still it seems that transparent and open source wallets should be chosen for high-quality predictors without neglecting security, which is very important. Considering this paradigm is now almost non-selective, it's natural not to wait, which I assure you is a paradigm worth thinking about.