I am a late adopter of a lot of things. It helps to save money and spend it something that works and is reliable for my purposes.

I bypassed the Garmin fad, and use my cell phone exclusively for Strava. I admit to experimenting with a cheap GPS computer to test out whether (free) Strava was worth it to me. It was. But the battery life was limited, and that's the reason why I jumped to the phone which also has bluetooth so it records HR.

I've recorded distances, sometimes relgiously, in the past. I've even used Polar uploads more than a decade ago, but it really was a bit of a chore. But the modern way is just so convenient and virtually instantaneous. I like it a lot.

The only gripe (and I am not sure if there is a way to sort it) is that Strava won't allow you to manually enter a start distance for each of the bikes you already own and have ridden, sometimes for years.