AirPods are a miracle; a true "wow" product. And as an aside, the audio is really surprisingly decent. I'm a professional classical musician, so my ears aren't terrible.
Without being an Apple product buyer myself, I feel I can get a good pretty read on Apple products' success by the degree of condescension / stridency in reviewers' language. Like some Garner hype curve for fanboyism.
Judging by your tone, Airpod is still rising in popularity, yet to break through to mainstream, but may still do so.
AirPods are a miracle
Seriously? Headphones?
However, if you could go back in time by a short amount of years to show anyone the current iteration of music player and air pods then I think they would find the technology to be tantamount to magic and therefore a bonafide miracle.
At the other end of the scale you have the Apple fan and if they find these Airpods things to be miraculous then I think they are only being fair about what has been achieved here technologically to bring music to the consumer.
Equivalent to an act of God?
You don't think you're being utterly hyperbolic here?
If I ever need a replacement in a pinch, almost every convenience store has an inexpensive pair of compatible headphones, good ones can be bought online or at audio stores.
Headphone jacks also double as line-out jacks, allowing you to play audio through any of the billions (!) of compatible systems without noticeable RF interference even in congested conditions.
I'm just saying: keep the jack there, it's cheap, it's convenient, it costs next to nothing in any way (BOM, water resistance, space), it gives customers good and valid options, even if they ultimately want to shove a little plug in the hole and forget about it.
It is not like a CD-ROM drive at all, because it is ubiquitous and common in use (unlike optical media at the time of the superdrive removal), and removing it does not notably improve the device in any way. It doesn't hinder form factor, it doesn't hinder any selling point of the device, and it makes hundreds of millions of people happy.
Four years ago, when Apple started removing laptops with optical drives — they only finished this time last year — from their lineup, very few people were still using optical media on a regular basis. Today, almost everyone who uses headphones uses wired ones when they have the option to.
There's a difference between avant-garde, and jumping the gun.
In short, the marginal cost in space, power, and BOM is negligible; and the value is high. I can't see myself buying a smartphone without a 3.5mm jack until wireless earbuds don't need to be charged more than once a month, and I can forget to put them back in the case for a couple days in a row without losing the ability to listen to audio.