Losing it is my biggest reason for needing the audio jack. I not only lose dongles I also lost my expensive Airpods even with the Find My app. I also lose my wired earbuds but at least they're cheap. I know many people that don't have as big a problem with losing things, maybe it's a personality thing.

A friend of mine semi-permanently attached his dongle to his headphones by heatshrinking over the joined headphone jack/socket (after having lost several already). Seems to be a neat/workable solution. (I've never had my dongle come accidentally detached from my headphones. Maybe the tolerances in my headphone jack and my dongle socket all serendipitously turned out "just right"...)

And you can't charge the phone while it's plugged in.

You can if you order a Chinese splitter. All it does is split your lightning into two ports: the charging pins and all the other pins. Because the sound is sent digitally from your lighting port to the splitter, then digitally again to the lightning-to-3.5mm dongle you have no quality loss from a subpar splitter chip.

Edit: to be clear, this shouldn’t be needed, but alas, we cannot steer Apple.

iPhones have had wireless charging for a while though. Not as convenient of course.

For me, it’s more of a problem with my iPad Pro.

It’s not even about charging. It’s about having to buy a USB-C hub just to plug in my headphones and midi controller to my iPad Pro.

It’s possible if you use a wireless charger