This would remain true if they sounded just like CDs but otherwise worked like vinyl.
When I was a teenager, I would occasionally buy a CD and put it in my car. A lot of the time, that was basically the only music I listened to for a month, maybe more, so I would become pretty intimately familiar with the album, and it would play continuously as I was driving. I would listen to all the songs on the album over and over again, and a lot of the time songs that I initially didn't like all that much actually became my favorites.
With the advent of Spotify and its brethren, it's much easier to only listen to songs that you instantly liked, because pretty much every song ever made is directly available to you.
Obviously, you can just play the whole album on Spotify, and maybe if you're self-disciplined enough then you could force yourself to listen to an album over and over again on there, but I have always found that pretty difficult, and my streaming ends up being kind of an echo chamber of stuff I already know I like.
To be clear, I do think that the streaming services are, generally speaking, much better than what we had in the 90's and early 2000's, but there are aspects that I miss.
We're back to a world of disconnected songs, in some ways. It's not uncommon for an artist to release a bunch of singles then just, later, collect those into a nominal "album" for physical sales, like the earliest days of LPs. Some artists seem to only release singles for streaming (I see this a lot in off-mainstream hiphop). I think only the idea and marketing power of the thematic album-tour is really keeping the form of the album alive as a shaping force for music.
As my parents have often informed me, an album on which you liked two of the songs was a good one, and one on which you liked three was a great one. Mostly you bought an album for a single track that was on there. But, publishers would frequently release "greatest hits" albums consolidating many popular songs onto the same album.
This seems to be basically identical to the system you describe that we have now, except that in the "single track" phase of the process, the track costs $1 instead of $15.
If you were/are careful in your purchases, you could/can find plenty of albums that are wall-to-wall magic. Some that I enjoyed in my youth:
- Beatles, Revolver - Beastie Boys, Ill Communication - Led Zeppelin IV - Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy - Metallica, self-titled ("Black Album") - Nirvana, Nevermind - Pearl Jam, Ten - Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon - Radiohead, OK Computer - Snoop Dogg, Doggystyle - Weezer, self-titled ("Blue Album")
I think the reason that Dark Side of the Moon, for example, is so loved is in no small part because it is was well tailored to be an album. The songs blend in to each other, there are repeated motifs throughout the album, it comes together as one big cohesive unit, and as such I can't really listen to "one song" on it, I usually have to put on the whole album (or at least side 2).
Or thirds! See: Monty Python's three-sided record.
Then there's e.g. classical music, where it wasn't unusual for one purchased unit of music to be a small box of several LPs. The album-as-an-artform, where "album" is usually one or two records created as a semi- or entirely-cohesive piece that was nonetheless broken into a bunch of shorter tracks and all crafted for the form and experience of the LP, was mostly a phenomenon for popular forms of music. IDK if "classical" music that was actually composed during the height of the LP was meaningfully and in some widespread way shaped by the LP record like pop music was, or not (I just don't know much about that music).
[EDIT] To be clear, what I'm talking about as far as the medium affecting the form the art took and how it was experienced isn't just things like full-on "concept albums", but attention to things like consistent tone or flow or placement of songs at the start of sides, or attention to which song ends a side and how that acts to draw one to the next side, or to close the current one, or whatever.