This is done to keep employees from sticking in unknown thumb drives that could install malware. Several critical systems on protected networks have been hacked in the past by leveraging human curiosity and placing a compromised thumb drive on the ground in the companies parking lot. Gluing shut the USB ports is a simple defense against that.
Yes, I had an MP3 player before I got my first smartphone.
Or, if you’re asking about apps, I used Vanilla Music Player. But nowadays I either use Spotify or a cassette player.
several cheap phones from Motorola, Sagem, Samsung, etc. (I couldn’t afford a Nokia 3310)
some no-name feature phone
some Chinese 60€ smartphone
Samsung Galaxy J5 (used)
Samsung Galaxy J2 (got it for free)
Gigaset GX290
Unihertz Atom
I’ve never spent more than 150€ on a phone. If you debloat them and use open source apps, you really don’t need many “features” or much CPU-power/memory/storage.
And I don’t think I’ve ever a used a different browser than Fennec, cause that’s what pops up if you search for Firefox on F-Droid.