But CUPS is doing the same thing, someone somewhere told me. Using old drivers with it is going to need jumping some extra hoops.

If you have really high end speakers you can hear difference between 160 Vorbis and 320 MP3, but between 160 Vorbis and 192 MP3 no way.

Nope, I would not call 160kbps Vorbis low bitrate, it’s roughly quality of 192kbps MP3. Only the ”popularity=0” stuff (so stuff with so few listens that Spotify does not keep record of) were re-encoded to 75kbps Opus, which as a modern codec is much better than it sounds like but of course re-encode is not great for already lossy stuff.

For purists there are those Tidal downloader sites available everywhere for free lossless music, even 24-bit hires FLAC.