Why does my Gen 7 ipod nano keep pausing?

I've owned a Gen 7 iPod nano for a month now as a go-to MP3 player for work (we can't use our phones to listen to music due to cell phone abuse that's happened). Everything seemed fine until about 2-3 weeks ago I found that my music kept spontaneously pausing. Ok so I figured that maybe I hit the button on the side so I used the remote on my earbuds to continue playing. Another slight move and the thing pauses again. I quickly discovered that the slightest movement of the earbud jack triggers this thing to pause the music.

I then thought it was the headphones and perhaps the remote causing it to glitch. So I went and bought a cheap basic pair of earbuds (Sennheisers) without the remote only to find that the pausing is still going on. I've cleaned out the jack numerous times and it is still doing it. Any idea why this is happening? Seems like this is a known issue as I've seen that others ran into this. Why would Apple continue to let faulty product to be sold? For $140, I would have expected this to last longer, now thinking I should have stuck with a cheapo MP3 player from Walmart as it would have probably lasted longer 😟

Are there any fixes to this or should I retire this practically new 'pod (and get my hard-earned cash back) and move onto something better? I'm now kind of weary of buying Apple devices if this is the kind of performance I'm going to get from it.