It could also be a marketing thing, right?
Marketing creates a lot of products that may or may not make sense. I’ll just name a few and I’m sure there will be people who disagree with me:

Curved TVs. good idea. Completely impractical in practice.
– 4K+ screens on the phone. There are probably a handful of people who would care about that..but come on…
– 16:10 screens (so you can keep the control panel below your video)
– Water resistance certifications (ipx6) on phones (This can also be done without the certification. There should be someone at Apple/Samsung who can put the phone in a bowl of water for an hour and spray it with a garden hose. More than that is effectively not necessary for the consumer)
– “smart” ovens/washing machines/etc/etc/etc that aren’t really smart because they don’t get past some kind of remote control
– Washing machines with 24 programs
Non-medical use of water softeners in the Netherlands (Among the expensive resin softeners you have to replenish with expensive salt)

Everything is nothing more than marketing, which makes / makes products artificially expensive only and then purely so that the expensive marketing mill gives those companies the right to exist.

In the case of HiFi streaming, of course, it goes both ways. There are legions of people who are completely unconcerned with sound (“I’m okay with listening to Ludo talk in GTST”) or who live right next door to the world and want to defend their purchases (“My flat TV has ‘very good sound’) or people who have speakers (pretty from cosmetically, but sound-wise, it doesn’t actually go beyond “mwuah…”)), and then at the other end of the spectrum you have a relatively small group (which are over-represented on this platform), who have gone too far in the other direction ((And of course another mystical group hanging somewhere in between))

If we look at the product objectively. Broadcasting HiFi to consumers, you might be wondering if a product as such really has a wide target group. Most people don’t hear or care. Then there’s a small group who may or may not hear it and be interested (because it’s “better on paper”) and there’s a smaller group who really hear the difference And Actually I like it better. (Because losing doesn’t have to be “prettier” than losing. That’s a matter of taste)

I can imagine there are branches out there that do their own audio processing for their product (radio stations, etc), and they really take advantage of lossless Hifi. But they are “allowed” not to stream via Spotify and its partners. These streaming services are only for “consumer listening”.