[thirdsun]

> or use a USB cable and manually copy the music to my phone.

So? I don't see the problem. I sync my whole music collection to my iPhone (using iTunes' very helpful transcoding option from lossless to 256 Kbit/s in order to fit onto the 512 GB internal storage). Using an USB cable about once a week to do so isn't really an issue, is it?

> Then when listening to said recordings on my phone, the music player tries to upsell me with Apple Music.

This can be disabled in the settings entirely. That way you won't see Apple Music in the music.app. Again, I don't have any use for Apple Music either, but I think it's fine for it to be present by default since for most people streaming is the most common way to consume music these days.