Someone's clearly still manufacturing cassette-mechanisms in quantity.
https://www.gporetro.com/portable-ca...ers-recorders/
Pragmatically, I can appreciate the superficial ease-of-use benefits of compact cassettes for ad-hoc recording (along with the deeply-frustrating lack of a decent inbuilt track-labelling/fast-search facility) but can't really see the market for 'serious' cassette-decks returning.
Last 'serious' use I made of any kind of cassette-recorder was one of the little Olympus mini-cassette voice-recorders - and that was nearly 20 years ago!