A concrete example: You say here that what Netflix provides is "visually indistinguishable from a lossless encode". Try actually doing this with an open mind and then make this claim again. It was definitely not the case when I last tried it (very recently).
Argumentation of this nature is sort of endemic in the tech industry: "You think you see or experience this, but I know what you see and experience and you are wrong". It happens in discussions about battery life, visual appeal of different encoding options, basically anything which is at some point subjective and while the people claiming to see a difference could be (factually) wrong in a lot of cases (I often cannot tell), it is very arrogant to sit/stand there and tell them that you know better than them what they see.
The way people perceive (and how to measure it) is in fact not a solved problem. There are studies done and we can often say with a high degree of certainty that something is probably not visible/distinguishable, but claiming something like that for everyone is too strong and also misrepresenting the state of our learning.
Complaining about the _size_ or _bitrate_ of encoded file isn't worthwhile. Encoding technology has advanced substantially since blue-ray days and we simply no longer needs the 40mbps bitrate.
Indeed HEVC can offer a mathematically lossless encode at around 90mbps for most content.