I have both my eSIM and physical SIM active at the same time; I need it this way, since it’s my personal line and my work provided line, both of which need to be able to receive a call, more or less 24/7. I’m an IT tech, and if you’re not familiar with the job, we end up on-call, 24/7. Usually there’s a rotation to the on-call (one person is on call one week, another the next, etc etc). So I need access to my work SIM all the time. With dual-SIM (one physical, one eSIM), I can make and take phone calls on either, 24/7. I won’t sacrifice either personal communication nor work communication for the other; and presently, I don’t.

The caveat is that I can only have one of them active for data at a time; so I have to pick which one. To avoid putting a lot of personal data on my work SIM, or a lot of work data on my personal SIM, I limit my work-related data and keep my personal SIM active for data 90% of the time or more. Whenever work demands require that I use mobile data for something that’s data intensive, I switch to my work SIM for the duration of that task (like tethering, or a video call or something). That’s how I’ve structured it. I’d like for it to be able to have both connected and direct traffic around based on app, but no such structure exists either with iPhones, nor Android, so I cannot do that for the moment (which I believe would require another cellular modem - which would increase costs for the phone, and most people wouldn’t need that).

I haven’t used dual-eSIM, though I know it’s possible to have multiple of them, and I don’t know what the behaviour is with dual-eSIM in this regard… Since it’s a fairly niche use-case, I don’t expect to have an answer without experimenting.