Once your music library gets to hundreds of artists and albums, scrolling through all that with a scroll wheel is so much slower than an interface where one can just type in a few characters and get the desired artist/album/song.

Just before Covid I got nostalgic for the iPod and got a used one and put in bigger storage and Rockbox, but it was precisely the cumbersomeness of the scrollwheel that caused me to give it up and go back to my phone.