Putting every password in one vault still feels insane. What made it click for you? Threat Model

Compare it to what you are doing now rather than to perfect. Four variations on one password means that a single breach at a site you forgot you had an account with hands an attacker a working guess at your email, and your email is the reset button for everything else. A vault concentrates risk in one place that is encrypted, that you control the key to, and that you can protect with a second factor. Concentrated and defended beats scattered and defenceless, which is the actual choice on the table.

Do not migrate everything on day one. Put your email, your bank and your phone account in first, generate new passwords for only those three, and live with it for a fortnight. Everything else gets added as you happen to log into it. The all-at-once approach is why most people abandon this, including me the first time.

The breach you are thinking of is worth learning from rather than being frightened by, because the lesson is specific. Encrypted vault contents were taken, but the metadata around them was not encrypted, and vaults protected by weak master passwords or old low iteration settings were the ones actually at risk of being cracked offline. So: long unique master passphrase, current settings, and do not assume the URLs and filenames in your vault are secret. That is a checklist, not a reason to go back to sticky notes.

I moved over eight months ago and the thing that surprised me is that it made my life easier rather than harder. I no longer do the password reset dance twice a month, which was costing me more time than any of this ever has. The uncomfortable feeling lasted about two weeks.

Print the master passphrase and the recovery kit, put the paper somewhere a burglar would not look but a spouse would, and stop thinking about it. Paper is not the weak link people imagine when the alternative is forgetting the only key.

Also decide in advance what happens on a dead phone. Second factor on a single device that you drop in a canal is the failure mode I see most, and it is entirely preventable with recovery codes stored somewhere other than the vault they unlock.