Agreed, I use the sort tags myself as my old school library-based OCD just won't let me find John Lennon listed under "J" as an acceptable practice!
Some players will filter out The/A/An as a simple sorting practice, but this is limited in scope. To your point P!nk has to sort as Pink, and A$AP Rocky as ASAP Rocky. Sort tags are also extremely useful if you have several versions of an album from different release years, or editions. All of this is intended to allow the standard Album/Artist/Albumartist/Composer/Title tags to appear as they should be expected, while the non-so-appealing looking sort versions of those do the heavy lifting, useful only in the background to keep a neat and tidy library.
FYI - On Windows, MusicBee uses the sort tags effectively. As does iTunes on Windows, Mac, and of course IOS. So far for Android only GoneMAD has implemented the use of sort tags. Possibly Foobar on Windows has some ability as well, but not on the mobile versions so far. There are likely other players as well, these are the ones I am aware of.