Don’t sweat on it. It was mostly curiosity what other people figured out for their setup.
In fact, there aren’t many “decent” players…
After several years of trying, I settled on Cantata and Quimup (MPD), Fooyin (local files) and Audacious (CD, extremely rare). I copy the CD using dBpoweramp.
Nothing more “worthy” could be found 
Where does it store the database? Can it write things like playcount and rating to the mp3 files (something that only amarok does, as far as I know)
Fooyin is much closer to Foobar 2000 than any other music player.
Upon opening for the first time, you have a blank slate and need to pick a view mode. Or create your own via edit mode.
Once done to your liking, you add your library…
As for playcount and rating, there are selections you can choose for the playlist bar. Though I never use them.
Yes it can, but last time I tested it was not reliable, so I disabled it. It didn’t update its internal data from the files after the initial scan, so in the end it wrote back its outdated value to the files. But that was a while ago, maybe it works now.
Strawberry offers the feature too btw., which works fine.
IIRC, strawberry is some kind of fork of amarok?
I think it’s a fork of Clementine which is a fork of Amarok!
Tauon-Music-Box and Goggle’s Music Manager (gogglesmm).
ProjectM PulseAudio Visualization for visualization (works with Pipewire).
ProjectM is really nice. . . like to see it improve in new hands. . . The screen art is mesmerizing. .
Rich 
Recently, I have somewhat reconsidered my attitude towards music players. This is mainly due to complaints about the correct display of tags.
So I abandoned Quimup as the most limited in terms of functions.
I’m currently using rmpc and Sola-mpd. Both correctly read and display multiple artists for a track, for example.
However, in terms of the convenience of working with playlists, Cantata, in my opinion, is still the most convenient.
I’m using fooyin as well, I love it because I got used to foobar2000 on Windows 
I tried to use MusicBrainz Picard many times, but nothing good came of it.
And the MusicBrainz service itself is blocked in Russia. It’s not entirely clear why…
In any case, I prefer to spend a few minutes manually editing tags when adding a new album to the library, and then not return to this issue.
Well, a properly organized folder structure, I think, is the best solution for a collection.
I’ve been using Strawberry for some time. It handles FLAC and MP3 well, gapless playback works, and the library management is decent.