Either way, whether one think their existence is problematic or not, to me, it does seem like the federal reserve system and CB's in general, are in the process

Either way, whether one think their existence is problematic or not, to me, it does seem like the federal reserve system and CB's in general, are in the process of "jumping the shark" wrt to CBDC's… they are already behind. Like you acknowledged in another comment, most money created now is through private banks lending and exchanging future cash flows with one another (some subset of which are also the private share holders of the different FRB's in the US), and arguably this is the system being threatened now with new crypto entrants (uncollateralized lending in defi is just getting started, stable coin fixed income is just getting started, uncollateralized and decentralized stablecoins are also on the horizon, etc) and increasingly looking to attract fixed income cashflows from tradfi (i.e TBTF banks who have been publicly outspoken against crypto for years, being forced by some of their HNW/institutional clients to get exposure), who are solving the lack of trust and market structure issues between counterparties without the regulatory overhead (which in practice is used to serve the primary dealer banks interests, so self-serving just like any other random defi protocol at its worse).