That was never an iTunes feature. That was a bug, that affected a relatively low number of people, and was fixed IIRC within a week.
Re:Demon-Haunted World
by loup-vaillant on Thursday September 07, 2017 @11:45AM
(#15192897)
I stand corrected, sorry.
Supposedly to save local disk space.
I recall an accounting of a composer losing his work file that way —they got compressed behind his back. Thank goodness he had a backup.