I went ahead and read the rest. It's like the author is pretending Android only has Spotify and clones, and nothing to do the iPod's thing. If you don't have a system music player, go find one on Google Play or F-Droid. I had PowerAmp and ditched it because of its online activation DRM scheme, and for a while I had Musicolet before it had a subscription tier attached to it, and jumped apps until I settled on Retro Music, for now. A better app might dethrone it. Come to think of it, that's a pro over the iPod, it's stuck with Apple's idea of the music player back then, but Android lets you choose upcoming and past players.

The intentionality of putting gigabytes of tracks and curating them after the fact is definitely way easier with Android, too.