Seems off to me. On Mac they abandoned the standalone keychain app in favor of the settings app just last year (IIRC). Why would they turn around and go in the opposite direction so soon after that?

I created a shortcut to it and pinned that to the Home Screen. Works great, but yeah, you shouldn’t have to

Use this shortcut from Ricky Mondello, the lead for Apple’s password development team.

I get the feeling they wanted to do a Passwords app for some time but needed to get, probably executive-level, buy-in to get it done.

Apple will get bad PR about this: they are “Sherlocking” password managers. 1Password will write a blog post about how this is actually good for them because now password management is mainstream; 3rd party password managers will decide to focus more on the enterprise market; Microsoft will come out with a competing password manager that re-uses the name of a previous product and is bundled with Edge, etc. How it always goes.