I listened to an audio book of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative , (three volumes), on cassette tape, while driving a big rig. Considering they were a library copy and the cassette player was a el+cheapo, they performed surprisingly well.
My Dad and I would exchange cassette tape voice 'letters' when I was in Vietnam, '70-'71, still have them somewhere.
For it’s time, the cassette was a big advancement from home reel-to-reel and even the clunky 8-tracks. They were quite sturdy and you could rewind and play back fairly quickly. The reel-to-reels were not portable and the 8-tracks could not rewind. Ultimately, anything that was magnet audio tape would degrade over time. Frankly, the CDs/DVDs also degrade eventually. That’s why, for true keepsakes, make multiple copies and store them digitally.