FLAC is at least as complex as OGG+gzip. That’s reasonable to deal with because there are libraries with many thousands of hours of effort put into them freely available.
But, trivial is trivial. Anyone who has had to deal with format support rot will sing praises of trivial.
My argument is that it’s a disappointing archive format given that any teenage coder can come within 30-50% of it in an afternoon by doing the most trivial thing possible.
Expectedly, few people here are arguing with me about archives. Instead we’re talking about streaming podcasts over 4G. Even for for high-end music, saying your personal bandwidth ethics/budget necessitates FLAC but not Opus seems more than a bit of a stretch, in my opinion.
Anyone who has had to deal with finding and recovering old data should appreciate the ability to fit significantly more on a disk. More redundancy and cheaper storage means more data survives.
> teenage coder [...] in an afternoon
Finding a FLAC decoder is very unlikely to take longer than that, even 50 years from now.
If your point is that most users of FLAC would be happier with AAC/Opus etc I agree (and with a more significant savings)
And yeah if you're looking at longer archival times, PCM probably makes more sense. But I think FLAC suffers way less rot than, for example WMA
Sounds like the people who are surprised at their end of month AWS bill because they couldn't bother to optimize anything.