Hardware is a real cost at scale, and a real benefit at small scale
The NFC decision changes character entirely depending on how many people it applies to, and most comparisons flatten that.
For a twenty-person sales team closing large deals, a premium physical card is a reasonable investment. It is a small line item, it produces a better in-person interaction, and the tactile impression is part of the point. The argument for it is genuinely good.
For a two-thousand-person rollout the same decision looks entirely different. There is a per-person unit cost, a distribution problem across offices and countries, a replacement cycle for lost and damaged cards, and a reissue problem every time someone joins. None of that is unmanageable, but it turns a software rollout into a logistics programme, and the logistics do not stop after launch.
The middle path many organisations land on is software for everyone and hardware for the people whose job actually involves handing something to a customer.
Using NFC with a software-only platform
Choosing a platform that does not sell hardware does not mean giving up NFC. A programmable NFC tag or card is written with a URL, and that URL can be a QRBold card link. Blank NFC stock is available from many suppliers, often at lower cost than bundled hardware, and you can choose your own material and finish rather than accepting a vendor's.
The card behaves identically regardless of how someone arrived at it — tap, scan, or a link in an email signature all open the same page, and all count as scans in the same analytics. What you lose is the single-vendor support relationship and the convenience of someone else handling fulfilment, which for a large distributed organisation may be worth paying for and for a small one usually is not.