>3rd party is dumb and should never ever have been a thing. Before two parties had the secret (or something related to it) and now three parties have it and that's objectively worse

There seems to be a misunderstanding of how typical cloud password vaults work. The 3rd parties like Bitwarden, 1Password, Apple iCloud Keychain, etc don't have access to the users' passwords. The scheme is based on Zero-Knowledge End-2-End-Encryption. The 3rd-party cloud is just a mechanism to store an encrypted blob and sync them to various devices. The client devices (users' desktop, users' smartphone) are the only ones that can decrypt the passwords. There are still only 2 parties with knowledge of the actual passwords.

In contrast, the type of 3rd parties that do have knowledge/access to unencrypted plain text passwords would be Amazon storing users' wi-fi passwords, and Plaid storing users' bank account credentials & passwords. Gmail and MS Outlook.com would also be a 3rd party having a copy of users' passwords when they act as web clients to fetch email from other IMAP servers.

>, my dad and his printed out sheet of password next to his desk is still beating every company out there.

That doesn't work for users when they're not sitting at their desk and need passwords. Printing out a hardcopy sheet of passwords and carrying it the wallet or purse is a massive security risk.