I agree with you that global skepticism is not persuasive, but the tricky part is defeating it. We can't really formally demonstrate that we're not in a matrix, a simulation, or a vat somewhere experiencing delusions of this life. That doesn’t bother me too much as a pragmatist and the reasons you provided to reject it are valid, but proponents of the EAAN really like to latch on to it.
It is quite easily defeated. This was the modernist project, namely to answer Descartes cogito. Cartesian skepticism only gives us a defeater for certainty. This seems to be a throwback to his Scholastic forefathers. But this seems to an absurd standard.
For example, just because I can draw false conclusions about my world due to the fact that when I put a stick into water, it appears to my sense of sight that the stick is bending, I can, when combined with experiment, that is introspection, experience, memory, rationality (all faculties of knowing that sit along side of my senses), determine that my senses alone can give me false information about my world. But there is no evidence that my sense of sight is always faulty or even mostly faulty, and when combined with other faculties, such as memory, introspection, rationality, other senses, testimony from others, my understanding of the world seems to be very reliable indeed.
The cartesian barriers erected due to the defeasibility of my faculties turn out to be due to a false standard of "Perfect reliability."
Firstly, we have no good reasons to believe Descartes is correct and we are living in a dream or being tricked by evil demons, or that our brain is in a vat of chemicals where our thoughts are being manipulated by mad scientists or aliens.
Secondly, we have reason to trust that our faculties above are reasonably reliable, from a vast amount of data operating in our world every day. That our understanding of a real external world is the function of the existence of a real external world, is (according to Bertrand Russell), a much simpler and reasonable explanation of the facts.
Further Russell believes our intuition that we live in an external world is immediate knowledge, that is self-evident to all, or intuitive. This external world inference yields consistent scientific data and experimentation that would be unlikely in a dream world, further this science can describe the nature and limits of dreams, where the matrix, dream inference can't explain anything.
He also held similar beliefs in his early writings regarding the origin of moral values and duties as highlighted in the following:
"After 1903, he became an enthusiastic but critical convert to the doctrines of
Principia Ethica (though there is some evidence that the conversion process may have begun as early as 1897). Moore is famous for the claim, which he professes to prove by means of what has come to be known as the Open Question Argument, that there is a “non-natural” property of
goodness, not identical with or reducible to any other property or assemblage of properties, and that what we ought to do is to maximize the good and minimize the bad. Russell subscribed to this thesis."
(To be fair, Russell initially grounded these moral goods as self-evidently intuitive as an external world or other minds, or the reality of the past, but abandoned this view for moral relativism after 1913.)
for more see:
Russell’s Moral Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
GE Moore suggests that all we need to do is look at our own hands or feet or things we interact with to know that there is an external world. Moore relies on the fact we can know things without being able to prove them such as external worlds, a priori truths, logic and math axioms, etc.
Instead of assuming that we need perfect warrant for all of our beliefs and since we don't have direct access by our brain to the external world but instead have our data of same mediated by fallible faculties known as the senses, therefore we can't trust any of our faculties, why not just ask for evidence that we are in such a matrix?
What good evidence is there that the external world isn't real?
What good evidence is there that other minds (people) don't exist?
What good evidence is there that there is no past, so all ideas about the past are false?
Crickets...
This is the real reason Cartesian skepticism has not fared well both with the public given their intuition, that is self-evident belief that such things as mentioned above DO exist or epistemologists (philosophers of knowledge) who have largely relegated skepticism to the flames.