Just for context, I moved on to wireless earbuds before apple found the 'courage' to remove them so it never personally affected me. However i find it very easy to sympathize with those out there who are serious audiophiles and have very expensive headphones that obviously do not work over Bluetooth.

You may not care about them then maybe you care about the countless number of people that just needed a private sound experience instead of using their phone speaker on public transport and didn't require any $300 pair of earbuds to achieve that?

Yeh. It was a shit decision only made to sell their airpods. Which evidently they did (look at the revenue brought in by it) but some people did fall through the cracks

Edit: this is response to a comment saying whatever apple does is for a good reason. I just stated one time that it was definitely not for a good reason for the end user...