True wireless earbuds don't necessarily have to end up as electronic waste when their batteries reach the end of their lifespan. Fairphone demonstrates this with the Fairbuds 2, whose batteries can be easily replaced. The earbuds also offer active noise cancellation and support for Sony LDAC.
I’ve tried telling apart 256 kbps compressed music from uncompressed. I couldn’t do it using wired headphones
Most people cannot. Anyone using Spotify has probably never even gotten into the audio quality settings to change the bitrate as it defaults to Auto. Auto shifts the bitrate down unless you’re on WiFi and you’ve set it to max quality. If you’re on mobile data it goes way down. I’ve had friends who are listening and it sounds awful, you can hear the aub-mp3 quality compression. They never care when I point it out.