Podcasts have grown in audience size dramatically, everyone has Spotify or whatever, and the iPod has long since been discontinued.

In the end I found my 2008 walkman and it works perfectly to this day. It's built like a tank. It has a replacable 64GiB SD card just for the music. And my latest macbook can now again work with this card perfectly for syncing. No upgrades needed for 16 years.

I also don't like the concept of renting the music for listening, instead I prefer to buy it, as directly from the author as possible – so I never used Spotify or whatever.

A lot of people are like this actually, I personally know a dozen who won't even listen to digital formats, only physical copies on vinyl, cd, tape, etc. – so it's a bit of an exaggeration to say "everyone is using X"