It absolutely does not require too much space. And you can still buy phones with headphone jacks, just not any of the (ironically) higher end models because OEMs know they can push their first party bluetooth headphones to these customers.
We used it for our dev and systems groups at my former company for a while and really enjoyed it compared to anything else that was around. When it went away, we switched away to IRC due to how easy it was to host and maintain. I actually don’t see a big overlap between Wave and chat and Gmail for how people use it, but I suspect that was a big part of the problem. The uses where Wave was superior didn’t really catch on until Slack came on the scene and had MS and Google then scrambling to make similar tools.
Google Wave was actually pretty awesome. Google just had no idea what to do with it and it was too heavy for phones of the time.
My wired earbuds cost more than ten times that and will probably last me until I retire. The vast majority of those USB-c to 3.5mm adapters are cheap crap that have a worthless DAC and/or fall apart after a short time. I have purchased my wife three such adapters since she decided it was worth it to get a phone without a headphone jack and none of them have been good.
I ended up having to buy her a separate portable music player to use. So thanks for that Google, Apple, and the rest of the greedy shithead OEMs.