Do you need active noise cancellation in your headphones?

As tech jargon goes, it’s not too difficult to guess what “active noise cancellation” does, or why you might want it on a pair of earbuds or over-the-ear headphones. But the electronics industry is full of nice-to-have features that are mostly meant to upsell you. No one’s getting much use out of an 8K TV at the moment, for instance, yet you can easily spend thousands of dollars on one.