Yeah the price doens’t really scale but if you consider your time worthwhile, then add up the total amount of time it has saved you from having to untwist a jumbled mess of earphones / roll up earphones into some easily tangled roll.
Except the original post said to "count the time you spend untangling the cord" (which, for most good, flat-wire headphones is almost zero). Habit or not, charging takes more time than properly rolling the cord on wired buds.
To this old fart, this sounds like the thousand other cases of "why learn a simple and generally useful skill, when we can use modern technology to avoid this one specific case?"
Learning a basic transferable skill is the scalable solution to this problem. You're not using wireless power cables, wireless rope to tie things to your car, wireless thread in your sewing machine, etc.
Also there's a lot of time spent fiddling with the cables in use that I didn't realize I was doing until I used wireless and went back for a week.
Only one of us have to coil and uncoil wires, and put wires where we want them and keep wires where we want them when they shift or are moved by external forces. Only one of us can use our headphones with a smartwatch.
AirPods aren't perfect: I've probably had connection issues ~5 times which seem to have gone away with the latest update. I haven't lost them, but they are really small and it seems like it would be easy to lose them. $170 is a lot tougher to lose than $8 (though there are also wired earbuds in the same price neighborhood). I do have to charge the case, but with my use-pattern I haven't yet run into a spot where I wanted to keep using my AirPods and didn't have charge available. Using them one ear at a time while the other charges for longer use is non-ideal, but that's mitigated by how quickly they charge.
Until I had to go back to wired earbuds for a week after using wireless for a while I didn't fully appreciate how nice wireless is.
I have a laptop, desktop, iPad and iPhone - for wired I would need USB-C->3.5mm, Lightning->3.5mm, and a 3.5mm extension cord for my desktop. AirPods "just work" with each of those with only a single click or tap. So no cord tangles and no bluetooth connect/disconnect dance every time you swap devices. To me that makes them easily worth the $170 cost.
As an aside, this is the most HN justification possible for these. "Just estimate your time spent coiling headphones and multiply it by your hourly rate then you will see how $160 is fair." Absurd.