There's nothing inevitable about it. If a user would rather risk forgetting/losing a password, than governments covertly and cheaply spying on them, they can do

There's nothing inevitable about it. If a user would rather risk forgetting/losing a password, than governments covertly and cheaply spying on them, they can do that, and the problem is perfectly tractable. It's only intractable under the demented requirements of delegating all security to someone else, and at the same time expecting to be secure against the entity you have delegated all security to.