Serious question

Or I could use a GUI interface designed in the last 20 years that lets me play music with single clicks, rather than commands.

vs
gr8 b8 m8

Personal preference I suppose, but most of the terminal ones don't have plugin support so playing esoteric file formats become impossible.

Because autism. There's an old meme about making software as a server with separate GUI that connects to it, so you can make a CLI as well as a GUI and easily swithc between them. The entire point is literally
but after implementing a million lines of code to make a serialization protocol and to launch shit in the proper context with proper permissiosn, and all kinds of other insane UNIX shit, it just ends up worse off than a normal program

are you the dickfuck that's making all my software take literal seconds to do anything? and no: there's nothing bloated about normal software. it's bloated because it's bloated, not because it doesn't have a daemon design...

I use mpd because most tools support it. You want a GUI? There's a dozen. A TUI? Another dozen. A CLI tool to query the current song, skip to the next or add something to the playlist? It's all there. If you use any player that doesn't support mpd you lose all the conveniences of a large ecosystem. But if that's what you want go for it.

It 'just werks' no matter what frontend I use.

lol

It literally just streams binary to a network port.
No special code required.

It's just a file!

Doesn't mpd have some retarded design where all your songs have to be in one folder?

Yes. Not a problem for me, but you can circumvent it with symlinks.