Outside professional philosophy, dualism is closer to the default position than the exception, because it underwrites the idea that a person survives the death of the body. Christian, Islamic, and Jewish accounts of an immortal soul, Hindu and Buddhist accounts of a subtle body that carries karma between lives, and countless folk traditions of ghosts and possession all assume some version of a mind or self that is not simply identical to its physical organism.
The philosophical criticism, that Descartes never explained how an unextended substance could push against an extended one, remains the position's most durable weak point, and it is precisely the problem that interactionism, occasionalism, and epiphenomenalism each try to solve in different ways. Physicalists regard the whole substance-dualist picture as an artifact of pre-scientific thinking about the brain, resolved once neuroscience is taken seriously; property dualists try to keep something of Descartes's insight, that consciousness is not obviously physical, without committing to two kinds of stuff. The disagreement is not merely academic within the atlas either, since it is the fault line running under every doctrine of an immortal soul recorded here.