I seem to recall looking into wooden blocks for my kids when they were a little younger, and finding not that they need batteries, but the new normal-tier wooden blocks are now kinda shit—small, uneven finish and size consistency isn't good, et c.—and you have to start looking into niche "premium" toys to get good ones.
We got some of those cube ones with the letters and numbers at one point, and they were noticeably smaller and worse-finished than the ones I had as a kid in the 80s, which I'm sure were just the only blocks of that type that some cheap local store had and were probably the same quality as all such blocks on the market at the time, not something special. The newer ones looked very similar in a photo, but were missing lots of textures (kinda, you know, a big deal to babies and early toddlers) and details that mine had, and the paint chipped more easily (probably a thinner coat, I guess, plus probably just lower-quality paint).
We bought our first kid a rolling walker/phone thing with some other features—yeah, electronic crap, but at least this one had a volume setting, unlike many modern ones that are just fixed to "deafen your child" with no other options unless you break out a soldering iron. By ~4 years later, between seeing other people's version of the same thing—same brand and all—they bought a couple years after ours, and seeing newer version at the store when toy shopping, we'd noticed that the "same" product, which looked nearly identical, had had a couple revisions, each one making parts that used to move or be interactive fixed & dormant, and otherwise lowering the quality.
If this trend continues even wooden blocks will some day come with batteries :p