But it still happens that I will use wine for games I really want to play and which do not have linux support (it's extremely rare I want a game that bad, the last one was No Man's Sky). Being able to launch them just like a native app when I feel like playing is a huge advantage (not even sure it would work properly in a virtual machine, with its dedicated RAM and CPU limits).

So I guess my usecase for wine is "gaming fallback". Not that I speak for the majority, obviously, let see what other people have to say about it. :)

Also, installing, updating, configuring, and maintaining Windows in a VM is substantially more hassle than installing a game in a CrossOver container. More people are familiar with doing the former than the latter, but the latter is still a lot less effort.

Practically nothing beats mpv IMHO as a general purpose media player, with VLC being second best.

I can do this:

    mpv https://danielamosboots.bandcamp.com/track/triangle-square