I recently went through something similar. The kid wanted to listen to music on a smaller device that wasn't her phone. I hadn't bought a device in years, but figured they still existed like the old Rio/Zune/Sansa.

The entire market for music only devices seems to have hit the bottom of the barrel. All I could really find in my cursory search was two or three cheap devices of questionable quality, all rebranded tens of times with random Amazon names as usual. There were a couple high quality ones, but priced at a point I wasn't willing to pay. The 'decent middle ground' seems to have evaporated.

I don't know what I expected there I guess, it makes sense that the market for such a device would be pretty small by now. By reading reviews, it seems that mostly runners buy them, as a lighter weight alternative to having a phone strapped to your arm.