I have heard hardcore audio nerds say "he doesn't"... Specifically in regard to that blog post. But these are mostly the same people who pay $bignum per meter for crap like silver plated oxygen free 3mm^2 speaker cable, so I don't really place much weight in their opinions...
Losing it is my biggest reason for needing the audio jack. I not only lose dongles I also lost my expensive Airpods even with the Find My app. I also lose my wired earbuds but at least they're cheap. I know many people that don't have as big a problem with losing things, maybe it's a personality thing.
A friend of mine semi-permanently attached his dongle to his headphones by heatshrinking over the joined headphone jack/socket (after having lost several already). Seems to be a neat/workable solution. (I've never had my dongle come accidentally detached from my headphones. Maybe the tolerances in my headphone jack and my dongle socket all serendipitously turned out "just right"...)
You can if you order a Chinese splitter. All it does is split your lightning into two ports: the charging pins and all the other pins. Because the sound is sent digitally from your lighting port to the splitter, then digitally again to the lightning-to-3.5mm dongle you have no quality loss from a subpar splitter chip.
Edit: to be clear, this shouldn’t be needed, but alas, we cannot steer Apple.
Don’t know why the parent was down voted for starting a fact.
I think the better solution if you can afford it is a Bluetooth receiver (Fiio make a nice one) for your old headphones.
If you are getting new earphones get some of the cheap Chinese BT earbuds. They are really cheap these days and work quite well for the money. I got a quite nice pair for ~$35AUD from amazon. Surprisingly good.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMX62AM/A/lightning-to-35...