Countries, nations and big institutions will find covenant useful.
Personally I don’t like them, it’s coin control and a limitation on what bitcoin provides.
Discussion
If y'all want total BTC supremacy and an accelerated demise of alt coins, smarter capabilities are simply a requirement.
Ironically, I think adding these "capabilities" makes BTC vulnerable to censorship and opens the door to cooptation by bad actors.
For instance, it's quite simple to see how a bad actor like governments and/or their bank cronies may require that all BTC within "their" jurisdiction be filtered through some sort of covenant that heavily conditions the future use of the UTXOs. If a UTXO doesn't come through that funnel, it becomes "illegal". Expect all those MSTR and ETF UTXOs to be immediately funneled and a de facto soft fork to happen.
My opinion is, this is the sort of extremely undesirable consequence of idiotic maximalism, which as I said, I find quite ironic.
Because alts are perceived as a threat instead of as a complement, and because idiot maxis want BTC to monopolize all spaces and functions, they will inevitably introduce all the bad potentials too.
I say let alts take care of "smart" and unsafe stuff and keep BTC dumb and safe.
I don’t think bitcoin maxis want or promote a fork to implement covenants.
Shitcoins are there, they will eventually die… new ones will appear.
Adding smarter contracts to bitcoin, as you said, won’t keep Bitcoin safe.
What’s the counter argument? Lightning doesn’t scale to world population?
Is not perfect.
But I rather have “smart” stuff on layer 2. Lightning, or whatever comes.
Bitcoin should remain as it it, taproot was a good upgrade and if people really wanted it could allow for covenants as it is.