It’s also about a third thing: capability! KeychainAccess.app can do things Password.app can’t: Certificate management with Certificate Assistant Storing, exporting, managing certificates secure notes for bank accounts, credit cards, software licenses, etc. (which I guess theoretically one could painstakingly move one-by-one to Notes.app as locked notes) And then there’s the issue of cloud based things being convenient, but I still believe in the resilience of the master data being stored locally, and being available deep in the African bush, even without Starlink internet…

Not sure if it’s related, but sometimes I get configd crashed messages within a few minutes of such attempts, but not always, and mostly with some significant delay, i.e. not as a direct sequence, so this may or may not be related.

The problem turns out to be a corrupt /Library/Preferences/com.apple.networkextension.plist file. This needs to be deleted, such that the system can create a new one. Unfortunately that’s not possible because in Apple’s “infinite wisdom“ even the root user has been degraded to a lowly user account with selective admin privileges, instead of being the God account it’s supposed to be. As a consequence, one must boot into recovery mode, open a terminal session, and then delete the file from there.