In general avoiding fees is definitely a good thing. Its one of those things that hindsight finds the best strategy and they were kinda lucky about the crazy bull market in the USA in this time.
If you were a Pension fund in France, Australia, UK, Japan, China etc and put all your money in the local passive index tracker you'd maybe double your money in the last 20 years but way under perform S&P which is like 6x in that period.
This is true. Of course, when you have many indices, with random returns, some of them will perform well, but past performance doesn't guarantee future results.
Except the performance of S&P 500 isn't random. Over a long horizon, it is explained by economic policy and resulting economic conditions. There is a reason that most EU and LatAm nation indexes have done so much worse in the last 25 years: Worse economic policy. I still have high hopes for China equities.
Is this a controversial opinion? The most I could say without feeling like a total liar is: It is probably random around some signal, and that signal is indirectly affected by economic policy in ways that are itself not perfectly deterministic. Is it I who is out of touch?
If you were a Pension fund in France, Australia, UK, Japan, China etc and put all your money in the local passive index tracker you'd maybe double your money in the last 20 years but way under perform S&P which is like 6x in that period.