There really are basically no Official Standards™ in this area. Even the formal-looking ID3 spec is basically just a suggestion, with many popular implementations deviating significantly (e.g. Picard writes technically noncompliant ID3v2.4 files if you have more than one MBID in any of the tags, because the spec technically says that extended frames can only have a single value).
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Perhaps, but they are all single track, not album focused
No, I am not talking files. I am talking players and how we use our music. What I am saying is that it has always been a standard for Media Players to use artwork in folders as well as embedded. I am not talking about a single file spec for different audio formats.
Yes, I understand if you have a batch of individual files then the artwork can optionally reside inside them. And this makes most sense for playlists and compilations.
When you choose to playback your music, it is the media player that will then select the artwork. And most decent media players will have options to set the order that artwork is looked for.
Interesting, any examples?
KODI and Winamp both do this. Think Yatse does it. I’d have to check VLC.
I don’t know many other media players, but a lot of the better ones did lift ideas like this from Winamp.
I thought the general idea was “if there is a folder.jpg\cover.jpg then use it, if not use embedded”. A quick poke into VLC and I spot the setting for choosing that filename for “album art”. It is a simple way to allow the user to over-ride internal artwork if an “album” image was required instead. This is why we get issues like popped up at the start of this thread and each player doing something different.
Sorry for the Apple comment earlier. In the past iTunes on a PC would hold a separate database of artwork which I think had been downloaded for each album\track. It used to make it a bit of a headache when transferring a music collection to a new PC.
A few services have already been mentioned, but FYI I use the free version of Plex which works great for a large library, just from my desktop.
This won’t solve your problem with devices like your car player (an endless source of trouble and internet queries…) but I would look into the service of your choice for your other needs and see how you go.
If there’s a spec that says players aren’t allowed to have a toggle for preferring embedded vs folder art then that spec can go do things to itself 
MusicBee does this, and I think Foobar2000 too? didn’t mess around with artwork too much while I was on Foobar, so I might be wrong…
Foobar2000’s options are pretty handy:
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