Edit: I really appreciate the simplicity of it, it's DRM free (the only DRM-free digital prerecorded physical format still pressed?) and contains lossless uncompressed stereo PCM at the frequency and bitdepth that is still the standard for digital music, good enough no human ear can distinguish it from theoretically superior successors.
I mean, that sounds fragile when you put it like that, but in reality you can go to any thrift store and pick up a 1988 CD player and a 1982 CD and it will more than likely play perfectly. CD transport and decoding has been a solved problem for literally decades. CD is very, very robust as long as you handle the discs like an adult.
You could take a CD pressed in 2002 directly from the store into a reader and many of the data blocks would already be corrupted.
Audio CDs last for a while because they are not lossless. Data CDs have a lot of redundancy to try to fix that, but even then don't last for very long.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_the...
Then you consider the fact that our own ears are band limited and dynamic range limited and you realise pretty quickly that CD audio at 16 bits 44100 Hz is, for all practical purposes, an objectively lossless audio format.
As long as you stay in the frequency range of the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem the source signal is indeed lossless.
There are a lot of misconceptions about this you should look it up.
Don't forget, that a vinyl has frequency limits as well.
It's similar to the difference between JPEG and PNG. There is a quality parameter when creating a JPEG because the decompressed image will not be exactly the same, but there is no such quality parameter for PNG because PNG will restore the exact value of every pixel.
CDs are also imperfect. There are two levels of error correction. Both affect the sound.
The only perfect format is digital storage of a lossless source such as a bit-perfect CD rip or direct digital master copy, with multiple copies in different locations.