A common use case for me was in the car, where I want to be charging it but also use the audio port to interface with one of those tape deck adaptors, or just a rental with a terrible Bluetooth implementation (seriously, some of them scrape all your contacts assuming it is your car, and store them in the center console).

I also have broken or lost over 3 adaptors now. This wasn’t broken and was pretty transparently done to increase the adoption rate of airpods IMO, so it is pretty frustrating. If I hadn’t had mind-blowing-ly bad experiences with samsung phones I would have jumped ship over this.

Personally, I regularly charge my phone and listen to music through the 3.5mm jack at the same time when I'm driving (my car doesn't have Bluetooth, so I have to use one of those 3.5mm-to-cassette adapters). Using a phone that doesn't have a 3.5mm jack would mean needing to burn quite a bit more money to somehow wire up my car for Bluetooth if I want to still be able to do these things.

My 6yo car doesn't have bluetooth, and I regularly do long drives listening to podcasts and running satnav apps.

Thankfully I have a sensible phone, but what's the benefit to me in having a phone that can have sound output or charging but not both?

> but I really couldn’t before either considering the length of the charging cable.

The only place this really makes sense is on a long haul flight when you want to make sure you have fully charged phone and listen to music while falling asleep.