If you have any doubt within your head when quitting, you will fail. When I chose to quit, I chose with my whole body and mind. That is, it wasn't about willpower against my own inclinations. If it was, I would have failed. But I may also have been helped by a few additional factors: The day after I quit, I also got very very sick. That knocked me off my feet for a couple of days, and probably got me through the first few days of the worst cravings (which felt like worms in my brain). Another thing I did was intentionally hang out at a cafe where there were other smokers whom I didn't know. I wanted to make sure I could be around people who smoked without failing.

My dad had never been able to quit smoking. I know how lucky I was to manage it.

"7.5% of adult smokers" in a single year is not "ridiculously low".

Extended over the long term, it suggests over 50% of people quit within 10 years, and nearly 80% within 20 years.

This rings true for myself and most people I know who smoked in their 20s; almost all had quit by their early-mid 30s.

But a motivator also helps - i.e., a real health scare, like a a potentially-lethal virus that everyone is liable to catch and that disproportionately harms people with impaired respiratory health.

So we'd hope (indeed, expect) more people to succeed at quitting during this pandemic. And once they've quit and felt the benefits, many will stay quit for life.

Out of the people who try, about 13% succeed. “Ridiculously low” is a subjective characterization, sure, but that’s a very low rate of success for any endeavor. The fact remains, as echoed by the UCL study author, that long term success rates are very low, the study doesn’t indicate anything more than people self-reporting that they are trying to quit. Right now, it is purely wishful thinking to interpret this study as representing a record drop in the prevalence of smoking in the UK which the headline to this post did.

The rest of your comment sounds as if you’re trying to convince me that it’s virtuous to attempt cessation. I appreciate that viewpoint and nothing in my comments (I believe) have suggested otherwise. Indeed, in my personal worldview anything so difficult to shake loose is worth gaining mastery over as a matter of principle, negative health effects aside.