I'm in on anything that prevents the "best practice" of entering new passwords that have esoteric standards of "strength", twice, BLIND, on a crap cellphone "keyboard".
The dots/stars for "password" type input fields might have prevented shoulder surfing in the days of wide-field-of-vision CRT monitors, and typing passwords twice on a real keyboard might have helped decrease people typing something they didn't mean, but it's all irrelevant in the age of narrow field LED cellphones held close to the face, using much smaller fonts.
The dot thing is actually a holdover from the days of printing terminals, where, if something wasn't done to hide them, passwords would be on paper in a trash can.
If you're going to drop secret masking, it at least needs to be optionally still available. Modern cameras can capture quite a lot od what's on today's bright, high contrast, high resolution, wide viewing angle screens from surprisingly far away.
Unless we're going to use a dark cloth on our phones as if they were an old view camera, I think secret masking still serves a purpose on phones.
Yes, they protect you from shoulder surfing, all twice in your life, where that may have been a factor. Otherwise, they are just an implement to the user, at this point.
The dots/stars for "password" type input fields might have prevented shoulder surfing in the days of wide-field-of-vision CRT monitors, and typing passwords twice on a real keyboard might have helped decrease people typing something they didn't mean, but it's all irrelevant in the age of narrow field LED cellphones held close to the face, using much smaller fonts.