Great article. I did my own write up about why I’m in the ‘or not’ camp a few weeks ago. https://colinwren.medium.com/spotify-has-just-ruined-my-music-listening-experience-ac0442584174

For me this update has made my preferred way of listening to music so much harder to enjoy because of the assumptions they’ve built into this new UX.

Given the subjective nature of music I think a configurable UI would have been better so you can get all the gains mentioned in your article but tailored to how the user actually uses the app