Nowadays, most people use password managers (hopefully). However, there are still some passwords that you need to memorize, like master password (for a password manager), phone lock, wifi password, etc.
Security wise, can passphrase reach the strength of a good password without getting so long that it defeats the purpose of even using it?
Yeah, I hate that. Forcing me to input special characters makes my password slightly less secure. Of course I’ll include them by default, but now an attacker can eliminate all passwords without special characters. Most people just put the number 1 or a period at the end of their existing, frequently re-used password anyway. Or capitalize the first or last letter. So it doesn’t make it really harder to crack dumb passwords.
It’s like we’ve optimized passwords to be hard for humans to remember, but easy for humans to guess!