In my opinion, nothing is quite the same as real analog cassette sounds. It's nice to play around and prototype, but if you really want a good cassette sound effect, you have to use real hardware, for now.
Tape as a service ? Upload your music and get it recorded to cassette and re uploaded to you ?
It’s all a moot point most of the time since it’s going to be compressed to crap by Bluetooth codecs before reaching most ears.
It's a good tool to make a sound that sound very artificial, sharp, perfect, into something more soft and perhaps interesting to some.
Vinyl has outsold CDs for many consecutive years in the recent past. A strong retro-trend is booming right now with (mostly young) people rebelling against things that are aesthetically too sharp or crisp. The imperfections you decry, are seen as "authentic".
A few people are paying more for their wedding to be recorded on an old SD Camcorder rather than 8k. I suspect it's part of a whiplash against (tech) companies "ruining everything" and a yearning for a simpler time by people too young to have experienced it
It’s like emulating old video games. On a perfect display it doesn’t look very pleasing but if you add CRT and NTSC analog artefacts, it may have some charms.