Why do you doubt the sanity of people sticking to iptables? What makes nft compelling?
That said, I think many distros are shipping `iptables` as the wrapper/compatibility layer over nft now anyways.
Are they? I recently had to learn nftables and they seem to be iptables but with a slightly nicer syntax and without pre-defined chains. But otherwise, nftables directly maps to iptables and neither of them seem similar to pf.