I support artists I like by going to their shows and buying lossless digital copies where possible (even if I listen to their music elsewhere).
But I don't want or need more physical "stuff".
Yeah, in some way that's true. In the house music scene almost every producer also sells vinyls of their best songs, sometimes "collectors editions", and also DJs obviously sometimes pride themselves on only playing vinyl. For the artists I really do enjoy, I tend to buy their songs + with the vinyl, as a way to support them, but I indeed have no way of actually playing them, and haven't had for more than a decade.
So here I sit with 20+ vinyl records, most of them unopened, and no record player. But I don't mind, I just want to give money to the artists that provide me joy.
So I sold and donated all of it, kept what had special value, and re-acquired a lot of it digitally.
I still think I made the right decision, although every now and then I miss something specific and regret it, but I get over it pretty fast.
20 years ago, I ripped all of my CDs into 192K MP3s (perfect enough for my ears) using an online metadata service. Getting rid of the 'jewel cases' (and eventually all of their non-CD content) but retaining the CDs (4 Logic cases worth, 3 sq. feet) saved a ton of room.
For backup I archived the thousands of MP3s onto an 80GB Seagate which I organized by genre, then stored in a shoebox. 12 years later I copied the Seagate to two more HDs. It worked fine (but gave-up-the-ghost later that year).
I've relied on those files since. Unlike several dead self-burned CD-Rs, the manu'd CDs (I never use) seem to have remained healthy in the cases at room temp.
I don't share the anecdote to suggest in any way that you or anyone else would feel the same.
The only "cheat" was a half-dozen boxes of childhood keepsakes in my parents' basement - that are now in my basement. ;-)