This is truly something that won't ever come back. When you see how popular AirPods are and how much money they're making Apple, you can see why they axed it.
AirPods could comfortably exist alongside the jack. If I want wireless earphones, I buy from other manufactures or buy AirPods. Presence of a jack would never have hampered that decision for me. That jack meant you could use your supplied earphones or any other to listen to music on the phone and on the Mac - carrying one unit of earphones. Today, if I do not want to buy AirPods or any other wireless, I have to have two sets of earphones, one for the Mac with a jack and another the supplied Lightning earphones.
They supply and sell an adapter cable with the thinnest possible dimensions. I really wonder why couldn't a trillion-dollar company have designed a solid adapter without cables. Again, AirPods are a great product if you want to go wireless. It
could have existed alongside in harmony without hampering the sales of AirPods, and
should have existed. Apple murdered the jack on the iPhone lineup out of insecurity and pure lust for money, they thought to push the people into buying their AirPods somehow, and called it courage. And people got pushed simply as they do when their bank balances allow the feel-good wants to be satiated and Apple was able to
intentionally hinder people's experiences just short of being debilitating and people decided to go wireless (a push and a want supported by bank balance) when they could as conveniently have stayed wired to Mac and iPhone with the option to go wireless if they wanted. Apple has been able to milk certain human tendencies more than any other tech hardware company and miraculously without facing enough customer backlash to make them revert. The keyboard fiasco was outright debilitating to people, so a small but large-enough backlash happened.
I am not against wireless earphones, I just do not need it. I listen to music in my bed, and on my 5s I used to use an Audio Technica M50x. While travelling, I would carry the supplied Apple earphones with the 3.5 mm jack and use it on my MacBook and the iPhone. It hurts that Apple took that choice away from me starting with iPhone 7 and I either have to carry the unbelievably flimsy adapter cable and risk buying it over and over should it break (that adapter costs around $15 here) or I carry two pairs of earphones with me, one for each device.