I think the bitrate stingyness comes from the fact that people tend to watch Netflix at home over wired internet and they listen to streaming music over a more expensive wireless connection, often on crappy headphones.

There are higher bitrate services out there. Deezer will stream FLAC and there are probably others.

Where are you buying FLAC files from? For now I'm still happy with physical CDs although I have ripped them to ALAC. I'm not sure what the difference is, but when I scroll through my library on iTunes there's never anything I want to listen to, but if I look through my physical discs I always find something I want to put on.