At my peak in the mid-00s I remember counting and finding I had just over 500 CDs in my car, almost all of which were MP3s burnt to playable CD-Rs laying in the passenger seat... the good old days. Nice thing about using CD-Rs is you didn't have to care about them getting scratched, either.
Sick of listening to whatever's in the deck right now?
Just rummage through them without looking using the gear-shift hand and hold one up in an instant without taking eyes very far off the road. Upon finding one that's Good Enough For Right Now: Pop the old one out of the tape player with a ker-chunk and a blast of radio noise, and then quickly plunge its replacement into the empty hole -- all with muscle memory.
Frozen mist on the windshield on a cold morning? There's a cassette-shaped ice scraper right there in the dash. Take it out, use it to scrape the ice off the window, and put it back in. It still works.
CD-Rs helped a ton and I deliberately avoided CDs in cars until I was able to make CDs cheaply at home. But they were still delicate things in ways that tapes never were, they still skipped in ways that tapes never did, and their sonic improvements weren't very meaningful over the wind and road noise with the factory stereo of a malaise-era Chevrolet.
lolno those things were a finicky failure prone analog nightmare.