And yet, the theoretical (not even real-world) bandwidth for LoRa is in the hundreds of bytes per second; perhaps whole _kilobytes_ if you're giving up most of the range and power savings that LoRa offers for traditional IoT.
On the "small devices exchanging small amounts of data" front, LoRa, particularly for large-scale deployments like the ones Helium resells access to, faces a lot of competition from Thread, Matter, and other "home-scale" mesh options. Until Apple or Samsung puts a LoRa radio in their handsets, it's going to be a niche product. (Unlikely because Semtech owns all the patents on LoRa. One of them might _buy_ Semtech, but I imagine they'd shell out $2 per handset approximately _never_.)
