The issue is removing the jack. AirPods by themselves aren't a problem, but Apple removed the jack to sell more of them, so I'm considering them related. Perhaps if Apple couldn't make proprietary extensions, they'd try to improve the BT standards instead, but I'm not interested in that.
> You have a wired car aux solution that...provides a microphone
No, by mic I mean taking calls and meetings on my earbuds/phones, which is a common requirement. Most earbuds have inlined mics sharing the same jack.
Car aux issue is separate. One of my cars does have BT, but that's even worse because the phones fight over it or the pairing sometimes doesn't happen. Maybe "pass the aux" is not a thing anymore and I'm the only one who wants passengers to play their own music sometimes, but this wasn't a problem before.
You have a wired car aux solution that...provides a microphone, which I've never seen before but lets go with it. There are dongles that have microphone inputs (Cubilux Lightning to 3.5mm TRS Microphone Adapter with Headphone Jack), but I'm assuming you can't use those because the microphone and headset are sharing the same jack somehow?
Your car doesn't support bluetooth, and you use multiple generations of iPhones so you can't just leave the dongle in the car. This is unrelated to airpods since you can't use those while driving anyways.
AirPods are expensive, I get that, and you aren't satisfied with cheaper non-Apple options on amazon. I'm happy not using airpods, since I hate earbuds anyways, but I guess not everyone is like that. Would the non-existence of AirPods make things better? I haven't had trouble pairing my conductive headphones, I guess I don't notice any distortion because it is going through my bones anyways, and I'm not using mic.