I've tried really hard to understand the outrage of not having a 3.5 mm headphone jack. I have Bose wired headphones and just use a dongle on the plane with my phone and tablet. My Laptop does have a jack, but it would be no big deal to use a dongle. I guess I'm just not an audiophile, but I doubt that many people are.
The outrage comes from having to carry both the wired headphones AND the dongle. The dongle is small and easy to lose. It's much harder to lose your headphones.
I think it isn’t audiophiles because they’d have an external DAC/AMP anyway.
Speaking for myself, I just had a strong attachment to my sort of middle-of-the-road headphones (Sennheiser HD380 pro). I don’t think anyone could reasonably call them audiophile. But they were expensive “to me” on a student budget, so I was worried/annoyed that somebody would mess with my (in retrospect quite limited) “investment.”
+1 to 8 USB-Cs!