It isn’t ideal but this isn’t for average playback.
Assuming even mediocre speeds, an average album in ALAC is likely around 350 MB. That’s about 32 minutes at 1.4Mbps.
They could start listening around the 17 minute mark and remain uninterrupted.
I suspect most APM owners would happily load the music to the headphones in advance to perform this playback. This seems so obvious to me, that I suspect it is held back by licensing issues more than cost reasons.
The playing device would need to do a good job with the interface but this is not a big ask—-people have been buffering for media they want since RealAudio.
AirPods are headphones, not a music player. A device that you have to "load music" onto isn't a set of headphones anymore -- and the features you're describing would add significantly to the cost of an already expensive device.
