You can put a USBC-to-3.5mm (or lightning) adapter on your headphones and just leave it there. Not as good as having a proper headphone jack, but it's good enough. Yes, they make combo listen & charge adapters, too.
My gripe is that I don't want to pay for a new thing that causes me a problem that I don't currently have. I don't want to carry and keep track of a dongle. I don't want to put wear and tear on the USB-C port for the 8-12 hours a day I've got headphones plugged into the phone in my pocket.
I've been using adapters for at least 5 years at this point, I've never had a port break. The dongles do break after 4~6 months, which sucks, but they're only like $8-10. Buy a handful and swap in a new one as they break. It is a downgrade, and you're right to complain, but again it's not worth making a big sacrifice over.
It's just that I've been postponing making any effort towards that, with some unusual amount of resistance that I couldn't explain until I saw the GP.