Why would I give up my existing wired headphones to replace them with expensive sub-standard battery operated ones

You don’t, you use an adapter and move on with life.

I seriously do not understand people who die on this hill. The 3.5 Jack is dead in electronics and the only people making the transition painful are the HEADPHONE manufacturers who refuse to wire a USB-C instead of a now-outded plug.

This happens every time an obsolete connector gets phased out: cheap manufacturers keep using it well beyond the reasonable time to swap out, leaving the end users who fear change to cling on even longer for no good reason