Friction shifters suck really bad, if you ride your bike more than once a month. Having to feel out the right shift point, adjusting front derailleur trim, remembering where you are in the gearing so you can avoid cross-chaining, having things shift slightly differently as your cable stretches over time, all of it sucked. I know the retrogrouch nostalgia goggles are an entire market sector in cycling, but 100% of the time people who spend a lot of time on bicycles prefer electronic shifting in practice. I'm old enough to have had friction shifters on my downtube, and I'm not going back.

I'm old enough to ride with downtube shifters too, have for close to 20 years, do so roughly every day including for the past several years in a hilly city where I shift a lot, and I could not stand the brief stint (~year) I did with slow, unwieldy brake-lever shifters. I had to adjust those way more often and more precisely than I adjust my friction shifters, too.

I was never sold on those shifters either. Mechanically indexed shifting in general never really was fantastic enough to justify all the additional finicky fine-tuning required for it to work well. But electric shifting is a whole separate ballpark; it's self-adjusting, prevents cross-chaining, etc. It's set and forget except charging it every few weeks.

It's like the difference between carburetors and modern fuel injection. Some people like to spend all their time playing with jets; I'd rather be driving the car.