Cybertruck is illegal in the EU, so I can’t.

Workarounds in a specific player don’t negate the fact that the format has limitations.

Aren’t there unofficial extensions to mp3 for gappless playback?

Yes and no.

IIRC an MP3 track is divided in fixed-length frames and unless the actual audio matches perfectly with the end of a frame, it’s not possible and that’s why cross-fading plugins for audio players were invented. The padding data is there either way but can be documented in the metadata section of a file.

Last I checked (and that was years ago, so I may be wrong) this approach was never perfect and prone to breaking. It’s an inherent flaw with the format where some form of workaround exists.

That said, for most use cases this is irrelevant.

A lot of people cant tell the difference between MP3 @320Kbps and a fully lossless FLAC.

MP3 has some disadvantages over more modern formats, regardless the used bitrate. It’s been a long while since I was very interested in audio formats, so I may not be up to date on some newer developments but unless anything major changed, MP3 can’t do truly gapless playback between tracks (used in live albums), for example.

Apple broke metadata compatibility with a recent update. The podcast producer I know with an explicit AAC feed decided to just redirect to the MP3 feed. Unrelated to that, they also increased the MP3 bitrate for better audio quality. The increased file size doesn’t really matter that much compared to 15 years ago and people without unlimited data can just set their automated syncs to WiFi only.

I feel like Windows tries with every change to push it’s users to Linux.

Even their core applications move to being web based.