The days of physical media for music are generally over, but I just feel cassette tapes could have been so much better than they ended up being.
Its hard because once a format is entrenched, unless its backward compatible with the previous media...
The market did try to make a better cassette in the late 1980s/early 1990s.. The "Digital Compact Cassette". they competed with Sony's "DAT" (Digital Audio Tape).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Tape
You are right though, at this point digital is king. Its weird thinking back to a time when music was physical, took up space and you had to think about what to play next (and have it with you). You were sort of stuck with the music you brought with.
I'm bringing this back to the web for sure.
I do have a turntable myself, a very interesting early/mid 70s direct drive table made by CEC in Japan and sold as a Visonik in Germany. But I primarily collect old albums that were released on vinyl as their primary format, I don't care much for new releases on vinyl.
I still maintain that the vinyl boom is a dad.
My friend growing up had a huge jazz record collection. He once pointed out that only a small number of them got converted to CD format.
We had one of those 3 head tape decks growing up. The one we had a yamaha with dolby hx-pro,b,c and dbx. We used to tape cds and try to a/b compare them.
The 3 heads were erase, record and play, which meant you could monitor the recording as it was happening and adjust levels and such. (and results in the weird behavior of the "tape monitor" button on amplifiers).
With Cr2 tapes (not as good as metal, better than normal) and dbx noise reduction it was really hard to tell the difference between cds and tapes.
The quiet parts on tape clearly had hiss without the noise reduction and the dbx noise reduction made the tape sound like crap in your walkman, so we just used dolby C most of the time. The walkman was always the weak link, without cleaning those rubber rollers you could get some weird speed ups and slow downs on playback ("tilt a whirl effect").