I avoided all this smart speaker stuff by going for a Marshall Acton II in the kitchen (music via Bluetooth). My wife uses Amazon or Apple music and I use Subtracks on Android to play to it.
I run a Pi4 running a Navidrome instance after spending a long time ripping all my thousands of CDs.
The Pi goes via a USB audio interface (better than the audio output on the Pi) and an EQ (Behringer DCX2496) to a set of Yamaha HS8s. I am pretty sure that works out cheaper than buying a pair of Apple speakers.
You can use Mopidy to get it to play audio on the Pi over the speakers (as in, use Mopidy mobile to tell the Pi to play from its local library of mp3s, out to its connected speakers). I use this for playing guitar along to songs without having to look at a computer screen.
Alternatively the Pi also acts as an Airplay receiver so you can play from your iPhone to it, either from your Apple/Amazon music subscription or via a Sonic API compatible app.
From Windows you can pipe your audio remotely to it using palink to stream your local audio to the Pi (it runs a pulseaudio player via SSH if I recall correctly). I actually use that to run Studio One on a PC in a room upstairs but sit on a Linux laptop in the sunshine, RDPing to the PC but listening to the audio over palink (better quality audio than RDP).
Adding a Wireguard server to the Pi (and pihole) and putting the VPN on my phone and I can stream my music whilst out and about and also get all adverts/home dialling blocked. I also gave my brother VPN access but to the specific IP instead of routing all traffic over it so he can enjoy my music too.
Best of all worlds and no vendor lock-in.