While I agree with the overall sentiment, streaming services have also degraded our behaviours by prioritising instant rewards and locking us into a platform you cannot escape easily from, and that once you escape, you lose literally everything, for you never owned those songs. Then you have social media notifications interrupting your songs, no headphone jack, and no physical button feedback when playing music on your smartphone.

I also don't really see the appeal of cassette tapes, personally, and the quality of digital media like CDs and even MP3 files is arguably superior.

I guess a good middle ground is one of those modern audio players that don't have smartphone functionality and take an SD card or so. FiiO I think is quite popular. Might give it a try some day.