Mp3 players are one of those categories of products that have been totally destroyed by cheap Chinese manufacturing.

The decent players like the Sansa Clip disappeared, and all the non-color-video-screen ones with long batteries are horrid cheap things that can't play songs in order, advertise ogg support but can't actually play it, can't handle random song metadata and silently drop such songs, bug out randomly, etc.

This looks cool despite the price... I don't commute or go out much any more so my uses are more limited, but I'm thinking of getting one anyway.

Weird that the only Bluetooth codec supported is old, low-fidelity SBC. Might as well not even implement BT (with its associated battery drain) if that’s all you can offer. Quality Bluetooth amps support high-fidelity codecs like LDAC, implemented in Linux’s BT stack for years now. Is this a deficiency of the Tangara’s Bluetooth hardware or computing power?

Also, the device might support SD cards up to 2TB, but browsing a huge music collection with only a clickwheel is painfully cumbersome. Even in the Rockbox-on-iPod days, I sometimes felt like I was scrolling down my Artists and Albums list more than actually listening to music.

Probably because it sports an ESP32?

The ESP32 comes with SBC built in, and the (open source) software is still under development, so presumably it'll get added later.