The days of physical media for music are generally over, but I just feel cassette tapes could have been so much better than they ended up being.
Its hard because once a format is entrenched, unless its backward compatible with the previous media...
The market did try to make a better cassette in the late 1980s/early 1990s.. The "Digital Compact Cassette". they competed with Sony's "DAT" (Digital Audio Tape).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Tape
You are right though, at this point digital is king. Its weird thinking back to a time when music was physical, took up space and you had to think about what to play next (and have it with you). You were sort of stuck with the music you brought with.
I'm bringing this back to the web for sure.
I do have a turntable myself, a very interesting early/mid 70s direct drive table made by CEC in Japan and sold as a Visonik in Germany. But I primarily collect old albums that were released on vinyl as their primary format, I don't care much for new releases on vinyl.
I still maintain that the vinyl boom is a dad.
My friend growing up had a huge jazz record collection. He once pointed out that only a small number of them got converted to CD format.