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 don’t want to have to buy and think about bringing jack to USB-C adapters whenever I want to plug into a speaker at a party or a car stereo, and I want to be able to charge my phone in these situations, or while I listen to podcasts to help me fall asleep at night with some battery-heavy sleep tracking activated
I wasn’t trying to say you wanting a wired headset is somehow not valid. I just always felt that a $3 C to 3.5 adapter you can permanently attach to your wired headphones is a weird hill to die on. For about $15 you can buy enough for that to never again be a consideration when buying a new phone.
I see it as a question of convenience, economics, and waste. It’s so easy to plug and play a jack without worrying about your headphones’ charge level or pairing them. No aux ports also means you have to pay a USB C adapter tax for one that may eventually break or get lost and it forcing you to pick between quietly listening to your audio and charging your phone. I’ve personally saved about $60 USD a year on average by not having to swap out dead Bluetooth headphones as well.
I get it if you like the convenience but it really wouldn’t kill these phone manufacturers to keep such a useful legacy component in the hopes you’d buy some additional accessories from them to fix a problem they created.