As a complete aside, I have a fondness for that older layout, back when I used to dip my toe in the jailbreak scene I used a tweak which sampled the album art and changed the layout colours to match the album cover - I think it was called “colourflow”

I always wondered why Apple didn’t integrate something similar into the player

Here’s a selection of album covers from my screenshots at the time (I used a different font as my system font for several of them): https://imgur.com/a/6rZ3JSY