But the important point is that normal people don’t care and they are the target audience.
Analog radio is efficient, and there never was such a dearth of channels like with TV. It would be easy to pack in more channels, FM was chosen for quality.
Nobody cares that the stereo is fake, it’s for radio stations playing mp3 files that have ‘fake stereo’ to begin with.
If you really want to believe that there is some conspiracy going in to change from analog to digital radio with worse results, to force people to buy new stuff, or for whatever reason, go ahead. But it’s not true. The reality is that with DAB+ more stations fit with good quality. Perhaps not good enough for ‘discerning ears’ like yours but clearly good enough for the general public.
There is no conspiracy, it is done completely openly, while almost nobody really wants it.
DAB and DAB+ are robust against multipath interference which means that you can have much more frequency reuse.
Wikipedia has a calculation for how much spectrum is used by one channel, comparing a 192 kbit digital stream to a typical analog FM station. The digital stream is about 3 times more efficient.
Of course you can try arguing that a 192kbit stream is worse than FM quality. But really it isn’t.
Yes it’s different, it’s annoying you need a new radio and sure, in 1% of all cases you get no reception where with analog FM you’d get some barely recognizable noise. But 99% of the time you get crystal clear digital audio, exactly as transmitted, of pretty high quality.
Anyway, whether you want it or not, it’s the future.
It ends up forgotten once the last patents expire and there is no value to salvage anymore. It's nothing but sunk cost fallacy that should have been stopped back in the 90s before money and careeers were wasted on it.
Here's a thought experiment to tell you why that is:
Say you have a choice of two stations, or streams. One of them is boring, but is of exemplary quality. The other one is fantastically compelling, but sounds mediocre trending poor frankly.
Which one do you use, and what do you think other people will do?
And the answer really is compelling wins every time. Quality is nice to have, but when more concurrent offerings can be delivered in the same bitstream, the vast majority of broadcasters will do that, because that means more money more ad dollars the whole nine.
Here in my market, we have exactly one full definition, full bitrate television broadcast station over-the-air. It looks amazing. The funny thing is, I don't watch that station much at all.
Every one of the others has 2, 3 sometimes concurrent streams. And they don't look amazing.
In radio, there are a fair number of stations that didn't do the digital system. Of the ones that did, almost all of them have two streams. Same story here, the streams I really like, are low-quality. Such is life.
I expect to see similar choice and quality trade-offs all over the place. The only way to bring quality up to exemplary standards would be to mandate it. Otherwise the majority of broadcasters won't do it.