The current state of the art is Opus, but HE-AAC is also superior, and then there’s always the appeal of lossless which is a lot more practical than it once was.
HE-AAC is only useful at low bitrates though (below 64 kb/s), and supposedly never reaches transparency. Above that, you should use AAC-LC (or, of course, Opus if you can).
Vorbis is also notable as a better format than MP3, although that too is made obsolete by Opus.
That's true, MP3 is by far the most widely supported lossy audio format (except presumably MP1/MP2, since MP3 decoders have to support them), so it will live on for a long time, although Opus is the best one nowadays. Just like with PNG and JPEG for images, which will live on for a long time even though we have WebP, AVIF and JPEG XL. And AVC will probably live on for a long time even though we have HEVC, VP9 and AV1.
Same here. And it doesn't even do that very well. Imagine spending 15k or more on a brand new car in 2021 just to realize that the sound tech is borrowed from a $5 MP3 player from the early 2000s.
Almost exactly the same situation as me. The worst part of it is it doesn't sort the directory entries! It displays them in the same order they are written to the directory (ie. usually random). Luckily there is https://fatsort.sourceforge.io/