Is there an environmental argument (reduce waste, save the planet) to be made at some point? There are many, possibly exagerated, pieces about the energy savings from something as simple as 'dark-mode'. These small changes if scaled to billions of users and hours represent a meaningful impact.

Lossless video is a ridiculous idea, but video encoding suffers hard from Jevon's paradox. The demand for video in pixel-hours explodes way faster than coding efficiency increases, and increasing efficiency expands the market even further.

To put it differently, you'll never optimize your way ahead of ten million people watching cat videos.