It all depends on what are you looking for. If you want to have more ownership of your assets you might use DeFI (but you have to be really careful because most scams are there due the anonymity) If you want to make future trades and need/want to make paper money for your needs (mainly because a lot of countries do not support crypto transactions or are hard to find) you should use an Exchange. I also know that a lot of people are worried about the constant lawsuits or restrictions of some CEX and the binance exits of this year but this is not going to last forever
CEX for me will always have the edge over DEX for obvious reasons be it security needs, support or other services. However it is rather disappointing to see several top CEXs facing a lot of challenges at the moment. But like you said I hope it doesn't last forever cause their communities are getting fed up already.
I agree but we have to be very careful about what we are getting, also I found a lot of Apocrif/Fake CEX and DeFI webpages so security is still an issue. in my part of the globe cold wallets are really expensive as well and the last issue with Ledger was disappointing