Why do musicians choose synthesizers over real instruments?

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depends on what you do with the synth. unfiltered sawtooth waves are out of bounds. you will want something closer to a sine wave setting, with a bit of medium bandwidth noise mixed in to emulate string sound or woodwind sound, in either a single synthetic sound accompaniment or a chorus. the duduk would make a somewhat unconventional romantic sound, in an eastern mode.

Oh okay. Well I wanted something like the sax, since the sax is used for romance and seduction, but I just thought that the duduk sounds better. But should I go for what sounds better, or should I go for the sax since it's more traditional for romance?

only you know what you want and need. i don't have the full picture.

I think the discussion here (OP meant) is not why not use real instruments instead of samples, but rather do people use "synth" sounds instead of samples of real instruments (or that mimic the sound of an acoustic instrument)

there are many reasons for that:
First, sometimes you don't wanna sound like an orchestra or something that was done before, which is what electronic production allows you to do: use the studio as an instrument. Augment and edit samples from any source. You can record yourself knocking on a lightbulb and create an entire composition just by using that sample.

70s and 80s synths sounded nothing like real instruments. so when synths came around in hardware form and now they have so many possibilities in VSTs as well, think of a composer like a painter, suddenly his color palette just go a tons bigger!

Now as to why do the top 20 songs (onwards..) on Spotify rarely use real instruments (even guitar became super rare) is a whole different discussion.. some points were made here: money, trend, listener's expectations, etc. There is almost no demand for experimental music nowadays, and it's too financially risky today (unlike the 70s) to risk deviating from a "working formula" which is why so many songs sound the same, only 4 chords etc. , trap beat rhythm, same sounds..

In my opinion, you can have real instruments and synthesis together instead of wondering which one is 'better'. The modern DAW and any basic interface basically allows people to do just this; you can design whatever you want or turn your mic / DI on for your instruments and use them together.

Not to mention, modern samplers can be loaded with said samples of 'real' instruments and manipulated further, thus blurring the line between synthesis and sampling instruments; lots of producers use samples in this way (even of regular instruments) in order to synthesize entirely new sounds from the organic source material.

Of course there are also hardware synthesizers which technically are instruments themselves, but this doesn't really have anything to do with the OP so I'll discuss this elsewhere

Also, you can get lost in modular synthesis for years if you're curious and not careful enough

Oh okay, thank you very much! I could use real instruments and synth. But for some sounds I want, I am not sure if they should be synth or real instruments. For example, how good is a synthesizer at trying to mimic flute multiphonics. A synthesizer can make flute sounds it seems, but is it possible to make multiphonic flute sounds like this at 0:05 into the clip, and 3:15 into the clip?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbJE_L80QRI&t=285s

using portamento, and some work/finesse you can get flute-ish sounds SOMETHING like that.

Oh okay thanks, I can try that. Do you know of any musical numbers that use it?

mebbe some rick wakeman, early stuff. he used a mellotron for most of that, though, but i think he also used a moog.