I ran a one shot for some people who had never played TTRPGs before. Once they figured out how attributes and modifiers worked, they felt it wasn't worth the complexity. An array of 3d6 values separated into different buckets, just for +1/-1 on a few skill rolls and the attack modifier. Yes, there's also encumbrance, system strain, and psychic effort, but skills and combat are the most prominent use cases for attributes.
It made me wonder about just removing attributes. At character creation you could offer a tradeoff between carrying capacity, psychic effort, and system strain. These don't have to be set with attributes. And you could offer an additional skill or two at character creation to offset the loss of characters' +1 attribute modifier.
For veteran RPG players the attribute system is no problem at all, but for new players I think they just make things seem more complicated than necessary.
And even for veteran players, I think the game is totally playable without them.
Thoughts?