Sometimes it takes an event to change your view. I bought my first noise canceling sennheiser about a dozen years back. Hated it. Tried the noise canceling on my airpods. Hated it. Kept Airpods on transparency since most of my usage was during walking and I wanted to hear ambient sound, and never drown that out.

Then never tried noise canceling this week while on the plane. I was like ... what happened? Now I am actively looking forward to it.

I also used to hate airpods for their disconnects but they have become more reliable, especially if you tell them to remain connected to the last device you manually connected to.

Meetings / video chats are an anti-pattern for sure. There is so much communication loss because of other factors - someone forgot to mute, someone forgot to mute, plus what not. You want your side of the communication to be pristine, and even if airpods flake out 1/20 times, it is not good. I agree with you on that.