Yep. Airpods simply do not support decent sounding duplex audio: https://youtu.be/N6Y_Q7RYmmY?t=351

No bluetooth device supports decent duplex audio, that I know of.

Correct. We rely on the courage of companies smarter than us to come up with the solutions to these problems, but sometimes they forget to fix the problems they're responsible for causing.

I'm frankly quite surprised that Apple hasn't come up with its own competing version of Bluetooth to fix this yet. I know they must hate it.

Yeah two way bluetooth bandwidth is too low to support high quality audio. People speaking on airpods sound horrible

yes, wired earbuds are much better for calls