I think there’s two things at play. One, small screens were never a good fit for that style of multi-panel UI. You could perhaps get away with it now, but we had years of small phones and iPods that were definitely not big enough. (FWIW, iTunes—or “Music” as it’s now called—has a UI option much like what you describe, though not enabled by default. It’s a trash fire of an app these days, but it bears mentioning.)
Two, things have changed with the move to streaming. The goal of the music player is no longer to help you browse a curated library, it’s to put new things in front of you. The primary interface is now the suggested playlist and the AI mix.
It’s a shame that the ratio of price/month of music streaming to album price is pretty much 1:1. If it was more like 3:1 I think I could justify going back to just buying albums. Strangely, I don’t think I enjoy music as much now I can listen to anything at any time.
Being able to scroll out swipe left and right would be quite enough. Foobar2000 has swipe gestures, but that brings you to the "now playing" view (for that one I'd prefer an always-visible area at the bottom, like VLC does, since it's only a single track).
Two, things have changed with the move to streaming. The goal of the music player is no longer to help you browse a curated library, it’s to put new things in front of you. The primary interface is now the suggested playlist and the AI mix.
It’s a shame that the ratio of price/month of music streaming to album price is pretty much 1:1. If it was more like 3:1 I think I could justify going back to just buying albums. Strangely, I don’t think I enjoy music as much now I can listen to anything at any time.