Because of greed.

Early audio manufacturers (SONY notably) used 48kHz for profession-grade audio equipment, that would be used in studios or TV stations, and degraded 44.1khz audio for consumer devices. Typically you would pay an order of magnitude more for the 48kHz version of the hardware.

48khz is better for creating and mixing audio. You cannot practically mix audio at 44.1khz without doing very slight damage to audible high frequencies. But enough to make a difference. If you were creating for consumer devices, you would mix at 48Khz, and then downsample to 44.1khz during final mastering, since conversion from 48kHz to 44.1kHz can be done theoretically (and practically) perfectly. (Opinions of the OP notwithstanding).

I think it's safe to say that the 44.1kHz sampling rate was maliciously selected specifically because it is just low enough that perfect playback is still possible, but perfect mixing is practically not possible. And obviously maliciously chosen to be a rate with no convenient greatest common denominator with 48Khz, which would have allowed easy and cheap perfect realtime resampling. Had Sony chose 44.0kHz, it would be trivially easy to do sample rate conversion to 48Khz in realtime even with primitive hardware available in the late 1970s. That extra .1kHz is transparently obvious malice and greed in plain sight.

Presumably SONY would sell you the software or hardware to perform perfect non-realtime conversion of audio from 48khz to 44.1khz for a few tens of thousands of dollars. Not remotely subtle how greedy all of this was.

There has been no serious reason to use 44.1kHz instead of 48kHz for about 50 years, at least from a technology point of view. (And no real reason to EVER use 44.1khz instead of 48kHz other than GREED).