How reliable is untethered music streaming over cellular these days ?

TL;DR: I want to know if a cellular SE (1 or 2) can be RELIABLY used for streaming Apple Music and podcasts untethered over cellular. I'm not worried about battery life, it would be its only use so at most a couple hours at a time starting from a full charge and likely no GPS/workouts. I just want it to work, and in the past it has been a frustrating experience for me.

Hi all. I used to often go for runs and bike rides with only my cellular S5 Apple Watch until the battery drain made it impossible. But besides that I often had issues with the Apple Watch just stopping the music, probably due to buffering reasons, and it taking a very long time to work again. In particular often the podcasts app would stop working in the middle of a podcast. It would work if I switched to a different podcast or to the Music app, but that first podcast episode would completely refuse to work again. It was very frustrating and led to me spending minutes fidgeting on the watch trying to get it to work again.

I switched to an Ultra about a couple years ago and initially tried using it untethered for a few days, then tried using it as my main music player for reasons too specific to explain. I found myself extremely frustrated by massive buffering issues when passing through an area with less than stellar cell service (driving so worse than when I go on runs). I tried syncing a bunch of songs but the syncing process would take AGES, randomly bug out (and often completely freeze my internet box) and the synced songs would seemingly delete themselves on a whim very frequently which was insanely annoying.

I haven't really tried using that Ultra for untethered streaming since then (most of my workouts were indoors) and I sold that watch recently because it was way overkill for my use (went back to a dumb watch).

I don't plan on daily driving an AW again but this and Apple Pay are the only two things I miss about it. I'm thinking of getting a used cellular SE 2 (edit: maybe not even 2, just SE) just as a glorified iPod nano that I'd only use for untethered streaming when I want to go out without my phone. Has that functionality improved in reliability in the last couple years?