You don’t need iTunes to manage an iPod. There are tons of alternative apps, as well as plugins for music players like foobar2000 and Winamp.
iPods are still great. You can even replace their hard drives with modern flash storage and they work. It’s actually really impressive, i built a 256GB iPod Mini and iTunes has no problem with it. For the Mini, any compact flash card works as a drop-in replacement for the hard drive. Other models require a cheap adapter.