Very true.
I am a born, and bred, die hard metalhead, talking about being impressed by John Mayer and a bunch of elderly men playing Americana atm though.
That's gotta mean somethin!
Im an absolutely sucker for professionalism in performance and quality audio preproduction though. Straight up. Those tid bits are very objectifiable and fall far outside the realms of "taste" imho. A more professional performance is a more professional performance regardless of an observer's opinion, and better audio quality, is better audio quality regardless of a listener's ability to discern detail

.
p.s. airpods dont actually sound absolutely terrible, but they definitely are not what i would even begin to call "quality" sound though lol. Its getting harder and harder to find truly transparent audio equipment these days across the board. If its not pop, or hip hop, pretty much any set of headphones you can buy from a walmart or phone store these days sounds pretty not great. A $40 set of semi open backs with generic 35mm drivers from amazon will blow them away in every possible metric, but you have to buy a damn type C external DAC and carry it around to even use headphones like that with a decent phone now a days, because nothing has a 3.5mm jack anymore, and everything is bluetooth, which in most cases cant even quite rock CD quality sound. Even the best lossless Bluetooth codecs top out at like 24/48khz and they ALL have aftermarket EQ's you cannot disable that only benefit hip hop and pop because you have to factory EQ the garbage drivers they use in all this crap to even be usable for music at all..
You can spend $5k on modern high end audio equipment, and still barely be on par with a poly film-capped 1970s silverface into some vintage AR towers you can throw together for like $300 from ebay/facebook. As far as the metric of "how much do i enjoy this sound" is concerned.