Contended atomics don't scale. It is possible to construct concurrent structures which contend rarely (but which must still use atomics to guard against the rare case when mediation is required). There was also an interesting paper from a few years ago about using HTM to detect contention in a scalable fashion. I will aver that such code may be difficult to reason about—shared-nothing has far more obvious correctness and performance properties. (Queueing/amortisation also works, and lands somewhere in the middle wrt ease of reasoning.)

Riscv has an interesting compromise, which is to delineate a subset of ll/sc loops which is guaranteed to eventually make global progress. I do agree that it is better to include real wait-free primitives like cas and faa; but I wish that such guarantees of global progress would be provided to HTM.