Fuses are simple, breakers are complicated. Failure means it doesn't open the circuit when that is needed. Less complicated makes fuses less likely to fail to open when necessary.
Federal Pacific Electric, FPE, is no more. They made a bunch of circuit breakers that had a propensity to not trip. The company was sued, sales vanished, gone. It has happened. It is not just a thought experiment. To replace an FPE breaker box and breakers in a house runs about $1000.
Fuses, on the other hand, are just a thin piece of wire. A batch can have a few tested by over current then every fuse can be tested by measuring resistance. There are no switch contacts that can fail to open. There is no mechanism to detect current coupled to the switch to make it open. It's just a thin wire. The thinnest wire in the whole circuit.
Breakers cost dollars, fuses cost pennies.
DC breakers generally have more voltage drop than fuses.
If a circuit is overloaded, trips often, and there is a breaker that is easy to reset, human nature will leave well enough alone and just keep on resetting the breaker. Repeated blown fuses will be more likely to be investigated and the problem corrected. Too many appliances might be split into two circuits or the chafed wire that intermittently shorts will be repaired.
With a proper design and installation both fuses and breakers go their entire lifetime untested.
Can you make a case in favor of breakers for over current protection?
You can use breakers as switches but every time you open the circuit while there is current there is a little arc. After enough arcs the contacts weld together. When you combine your switching with over current protection you run the risk of the contacts becoming welded and then not having over current protection.
If the pennies price of a fuse is too much, do what the car companies do. The fat wire from the battery to the alternator has a fusible link. That's a piece of wire that is a smaller size and a lower melting point than the rest of the wire. If an alternator shorts the battery will blow the link rather than ignite the entire harness.
If you set up a system with a bunch of different wire sizes and a bunch of different fuse ratings someone will get confused and put a 30 amp fuse in the socket for a 5 amp circuit. Breakers just get reset avoiding that confusion. It would work equally well to use AWG #10 wire for all loads with 30 amp fuses everywhere. That's what I have. I use an 85 amp maxifuse at the battery and 30 amp regular size fuses.
Aside from the general breaker / fuse question, strictly with automotive parts, there is a gotcha. The pins on a breaker are bigger than the pins on a fuse. After putting a breaker in a fuse box a fuse will be loose. I ruined one spot in a 6 position $9 fuse box. A whole new fuse box was much cheaper than an FPE breaker box. I saw that as $9 tuition at the school of experience.
