it depends on what you value. most high volume businesses aren’t optimizing for developer happiness..they don’t want a business expense like payment processing taking 3% of every sale.

If you’re at high volume, you don’t pay Stripe retail rate.

sure - but smaller vol merchants with thin margins can also be sensitive to payment processing costs too

Is your point here that Stripe isn't the best solution for every merchant?

That's not surprising. But they seem to do what they do well, and have a lot of happy customers.