I worked for a large fintech company doing cashless payments. This is a naive understanding of things. One of the biggest drivers for merchants was the speed of the transaction. You see a lot of talk about wanting to be able to track cash flows, spending habits, etc (*). That's not the biggest driver (for merchants), it's the speed of the transaction and not having to physically handle cash (for efficiency and security reasons). An ideal cashless payment takes less than 5 secs total. Cash takes 10+ sec, more like 20-30 sec or even more. For merchants that do a large volume (convenience, grocery, public transit, etc) having everyone use cash is untenable, they would have to double or triple the number of PoS (Point of Sale) machines.
Which brings up the second, and real issue, any chain store relies heavily on their PoS system which went down and is where the real issue lies. It does the pricing, the book keeping and the inventory (and usually forecasting). Nothing price tags anymore, so that 30 sec to pay with cash just became 1-2+ minutes while the clerk figures out the prices, tallies them up, figures out the tax (which in some places is variable depending on what you're buying). Manually booking flights for a major airline? You can just forget about it.
You think want a cash based society, but you really, really don't. It's going to cost you, personally, a significant amount of time and it also going to drive up the prices you pay. You want the system to be as redundant and fail safe as possible. Cashless apps/cards should be able to work independently for a time, PoS systems should be able to work even if the back office goes down, etc.
There is nothing special about cash. We have it because we reached a point where barter was inefficient. No one wants to be lugging 5 pounds of flour and vegetables around hoping the merchant will accept them. We've reach a point where cash is no longer an efficient way of supporting 8 billion (and growing) people.
(*) Merchants do want to track cash flows and spending habits, especially larger merchants... but they generally keep this data for themselves. Payments systems are generally not getting as much of this data as many people think. It was a struggle just to get data that was required for regulatory compliance (can't apply rebates/etc to alcohol & tobacco).