They did explain and so does the article:

From the article:

>'2. The Truest Capture It is sonic fidelity, first and foremost, that defines the importance of masters. “A master is the truest capture of a piece of recorded music,” said Adam Block, the former president of Legacy Recordings, Sony Music Entertainment’s catalog arm. “Sonically, masters can be stunning in their capturing of an event in time. Every copy thereafter is a sonic step away.”'

There is no recording with fidelity greater than the master tapes. It is the canonical "lossless" audio source. To state that the loss of a retail outlet that sold consumer products is somehow greater than the loss of 175K original audio recording from which all retail products were generated from is truly bizarre. I didn't take the OP's tone aggressive just one of astonishment.

Remember that what.cd only stored metadata files like .torrents/magnets/.cues/etc. I doubt very few, if any, of the rare releases there were actually lost; they're still out there somewhere in the Internet. What was lost was the platform and the community that allowed said rare music to be easily shared and propagated.

Can you still use a cached copy of what.cd since all it hosted was metadata that you could pull downloads from?