the target audience is practically non-existent. nobody with 40 year old hardware is clamoring for a new audio codec.
The target audience is games, not your music collection.
You underestimate the kind of people that use 40 year old hardware
Have you heard about IoT and low-end consumer devices?
oh, you mean things like the ESP8266, which costs mere dollars and can definitely can already decode and play MP3s? 40 lines of code to play MP3s on an ESP32 as well.
Yes, there's only chips with a huge community sourced eco system like Espressif out there. Nothing else.