Since you have the 9th gen you know the sound quality is atrocious. It's fast enough for all daily tasks but the bad sound alone made me get ride of mine quickly. The low memory also means that whenever you switch between apps the bigger ones like a browser with a couple open tabs or games get killed almost immediately making me lose progress in paused videos. Couple that with the high price for a 2 year old device containing even older hardware and at $300 or even above that I find it way too expensive. It was on sale at $230 this year which is alright and should really be default pricing going into 2024.
Otherwise I'd look at an iPad Air 4th gen, directly refurbished from Apple it's about the same price as a 10th gen iPad and it's got slightly better hardware. Sound still isn't great honestly, especially as a kitchen radio it's so thin and squeaky I can barely hear it when food on the stove's sizzling, but there is only so much sound you can get out of a tiny device like that (and the iPad Pros with better sound are much more expensive). It has a bit more memory so apps don't close and reload quite as often.
Apple really did a perfect job with their iPad lineup to always leave something to be desired and push users towards the more expensive models. I have a 5th gen Air with M1 now and it was significantly cheaper than any M1 iPad Pro, yet the rest of the hardware (build quality, battery, sound, display brightness, static display lighting) is still lackluster enough that I wish I had gotten an iPad Pro instead despite the much higher cost.
