Spotify is better than the competitors. HN is just filled with grumps who love to complain about everything.
I tried three competitors as I moved away from Spotify, and found they were all substantially better than it.
I care about music selection, recommendation quality, and library stability (not deleting stuff from my collection).
Just the other day I built my own podcast picker script that curates a playlist of subscribed podcast episodes in exactly the way I want (balance-wise/order-wise). Sounds minor, but it has been huge for my smart-home listening experience, given how terrible the out-of-box podcast experience is with Alexa.