Years ago, I would have agreed with you, for the longest time I used an iAudio 5XL with Rockbox. It was the best portable music player.

But now... I can have a cell phone with 512GB of storage and run Foobar2000 [1][2]. Nothing else can compete.

[1][Android] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.foobar2000...

[2] [iOS] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/foobar2000/id1072807669