I see the benefits but cannot trust that there won't be a breach and all that info will be sold leading to identity theft. Centralized systems have just been shown to fail over the past ten years.
Can't speak for all countries, but some countries like Estonia, identity is stored via asymmetric certs that can't be downloaded off your card. The only thing centralized afaik, is the authority cert. If that gets compromised, all signatures require a trusted timestamp, so you can easily invalidate signatures made with false or compromised certs.
Yeah. Honestly, I prefer it to anything else. For example, if I'm signing a contract, then the signature comes with their personal ID number. If I need to sue, then
I have their personal ID number
I can electronically serve them the court documents