Ha, you say that.
When my wife’s German T-Mobile eSIM vanished during transfer to a new phone, their portal for downloading a new one required a token sent to that very phone number we just lost access to.
This meant we had to do a trip to their store where they said that there’s no process for the store to supply us with an eSIM, but they’ll setup a new traditional SIM which we could then convert to eSIM. Ridiculous! At least it was all free - apart from the time spent.
That was a few years ago, though. So, I very much hope they’ve improved on the process.
If we're going on anecdotes, I've had a number of times when a physical SIM popped into a smartphone started behaving bewilderingly.