People were listening to low-quality audio all the time before things went digital. The radio was the most popular way to listen to music for a very long time and it was not high quality until relatively recently. There was vinyl for a while, but many people just bought cheap turntables and didn't see a need to spend the money for a quality one. Audio cassettes were far from lossless, and people would put them into cheap stereos or they used cheap headphones. Cheap headphones have been used for many decades.

My point is that the general public has never really cared about audio quality, and the people who do care have always had ways to hear quality sound. I don't think that has changed at all (or if anything, quality has become cheaper to achieve, so more people can afford it).