I brought an MP3 Player like an year ago as:

• to conserve battery life on my phone
• Google Pixel didn't have MircoSD slot or headphone jack without use of headphone USB-C dongle

So I look around for any good second-hand MP3 players which I did look at the iPods because of DankPod's video which he often mods the iPod. I did tried to mod it but it was annoying to do and I have ended up damaging it which is easy to do when you are trying to mod the iPod to use an SD-Card adapter instead of the hard drive which no longer works. Instead of doing a second try and buying another iPod which can cost around £30-60 depending on the model in question, I just brought a SanDisk's Sansa Clip Zip which has MircoSD slot and also can have Rockbox flashed. I mainly have Rockbox just for the themes and last.fm Scrobble plugin. It's bit clunky the menus but you do get used to it and it has a lot of options in the settings which I recommend reading the manuals on their website about it.

My experience with it is that I used my phone less for listening to music has I have more storage for my .flac music library. It hasn't replaced any of the music streaming services for me as I used two of them for different purposes. For my MP3 Player, it's music I already owned and at least liked the song so I got an album if I have already got it and streaming services to discover music I hadn't listen to or got just yet.