I did lots of reading about this and am still wondering why someone would want to opt for catch-all domains over aliases. Catch-alls seem highly susceptible to spam and while I haven’t actually done any email aliasing yet,

I'm using catch-all since years and no spammer has ever made up a new email alias to spam me.

it doesn’t seem to take much effort to make a new alias if you have a plan with unlimited aliases.

That depends. The moment you are in a shop without your phone/email and they really want an email address you can simply write down their_company_name@your_email_domain_name for them without having to compromise anything.

Custom domains mean that if the alias provider enshittifies, you can switch to any other provider near-instantly. As long as you never use the domains to host illegal or dodgy shit it's extremely unlikely you'll ever lose them — far less likely than losing a gmail or whatever.

With SL you can avoid spam by using the "beta" (been beta for 3+ years lol) "auto create" option instead of a catch-all, meaning that you can direct emails to different inboxes (or do nothing) based on specific regex strings you control — up to 100 of them. I had a catch-all regex (.*) as my # 100 and it took 2 years to receive catch-all fishing spam. Then I removed it and now have only random strings (e.g. .*fgyu.*) so new emails must have them if they want to get somewhere. Everything else bounces. All previous emails continue to work until you disable them individually.

I use a mix:

• SL-domains: anything I don't give a shit about.
• Non-PII domain: anything I would want to persist if I changed provider, but don't need my identity, or can give out a unique email in-person.
• PII-domain: banks and all other services tied to my identity.
• Top-Secret-PII-domain: critical services that could compromise all others (password manager, email/OS accounts, domain name registrar).

Both are fine choices depending on your requirements. The thing with external alias services, you are not in control of the addresses/domain. Catch-all addresses are essentially aliases you manage, but something like Simplelogin does have the benefit of hiding your domain name.

Spam is not a big deal on catch-all. A couple of times a year I do get a spam mail to some arbirtary address, but that's more or less it.