In what crypto? Holding in USDC means trusting your money with Circle, and holding BTC means trusting whatever exchange that you're going to deposit your money into.
Holding BTC doesn’t require trust in a single exchange, only trust that it continues to hold some market value.
If you have $20K of non-blacklisted BTC you will probably be able to find a buyer somewhere in the world, though the exchange rate might not be as efficient as a CEX like Coinbase.
GP’s logic seems poor though. In US or EU, probably safer to hold up to the insurance limit in local banks. Beyond that, or for higher risk assets or in countries with poor banking infra, crypto becomes a viable option.
I hold some tokens from a project I worked on for 2 years (I hold everything on-chain) and also from my own project which I built (and designed the signature algorithm from scratch) so it's hard to get more security than that.
