It's still an excellent app to organise your local (or OneDrive based) music... Not everyone can or want to use a subscription, and for them these (equalizer, visualizations, etc.) are great additions

Your author @DaveWShanahan is mixing service with an app in the article. Microsoft DID discontinue the service, but did NOT kill the app. Some fact-checking and cross-checking would not harm anyone.

Can they just give Windows Media Player a cosmetic UWP facelift, call it Groove and go away? Is that so hard?