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 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.
If waste and efficiency are real concerns you should be against the old headphone jacks. They waste a lot of space and are an entrypoint for water and dust, for redundant functionality that already exists in usbc or lightning
They may be an entry point for water and dust yet my current 3.5mm jack equipped Xcover 6 Pro is IP68 rated at 1.5m of water for 35 minutes according to GSMArena. I’m not exactly looking to go snorkeling with my phone any time soon either so it’s not like it’ll be a concern for anyone in the vast majority of use cases. I’ve had water splash on it occasionally over the years and it never caused any harm either.
I can’t really talk about what the PCB footprint of a 3.5mm jack is but if it’s something that already comfortably existed on most previous phones along with micro SD and Sim card holders until very recently then I doubt it actually matters. Keep in mind phone manufacturers are incentivized to hold back on as many features as possible if it means they can cut down on BOM costs and make an additional sale through apps or accessories down the line.