I’d never, ever, want to see high end audio equipment die. When it all works together, the experience is truly sublime, engrossing and immersive like nothing else.
The pro side has some weird beliefs and desires too though, like an obsession with vintage gear including stuff like early digital reverbs. Plenty of pros believe that Mogami Gold cables are actually better in terms of sound quality, but my studio is wired up with Canare star quad for the extra noise rejection and a lot of GLS plus some Hosa patch cables as I’ve found their connectors to be good-enough quality and the cables are generally easy enough to work with / durable without being overly expensive. Megabuck old-school gear like LA-2As, 1176es, Neve 1073s, Neumann U67 and more-recent Sony C800-G mics, Manley compressors, etc all have crazy followings and people are always GASing for them, but they won’t make a crap song magically sound good, only take an already-good song and take it up another 10% (and even then only in skilled hands). So much more can be achieved by most folks with just more practice and education around mixing, yet everyone wants to spend their way to better sound.
Instruments and their amps are arguably even worse, with guitar and synth players as large contributors (I’m guilty as heck here too). We always want that perfect axe that we somehow believe will take us to the next level, or that vintage CS-80 or Rhodes. We know we’d be better off practicing and learning our instruments better, but instead we endlessly tweak Kemper profiles, swap strings / pickups / picks, rewire pedal boards, rearrange modular synths, and most importantly, read, talk about, and pine for the next gear purchase. It’s madness. There’s even a joke in the modular community that making music is the least important part of modular synths. “Music? Never heard of it. My $8000 electronic mission center only does microtonal bleeps and bloops in Euclidean cycles.”
But anyway, hobbies are fun. Sad to see Onkyo go, but not that sad as I never actually owned any of their gear. They seemed like a cheaper Denon. I was always more into the DIY side of home audio before I switched to pro gear, with folks like Nelson Pass and Siegfried Linkwitz as personal heroes. Don’t forget Roger Linn and Daphne Oram on the creation side!
Seconding this. A friend of mine had a pair of ATC SCM25As, and they blew me away. I had never heard music like that before (and I'd been producing music for a decade prior on mid-range professional gear). I didn't have 20k to drop, but I did have $2k, so I got a nice pair of headphones + a little desktop DAC+Amp setup, and I'm about 90% as happy.
I literally did not know what I was missing. And I consider myself fairly pragmatic about audiophile stuff.
As a side note, this friend was also super into vintage gear, but for different reasons than you mention... for him, vintage gear is how he could take tax writeoffs in his industry (video games), where finding things to expense is fairly difficult. A $50k vintage compressor is an easy loss on the balance sheet, then you sell it later for what you paid, or more. Similar to how art works on the high end.
As far as cables etc are concerned, I personally have a very weird situation, where I have a large radio transmitter on the roof above my apartment. I've found that audio gear involving amplification (turntable pre-amps especially) are very very sensitive to RF interference from the transmitters above me. So I've spent more time than I'd have liked swapping out parts to ensure my entire chain is properly shielded from interference (e.g. I had to get rid of an otherwise great Schiit turntable preamp because it picked up too much noise). Really uncommon and frustrating thing to deal with.
On the other, a decent home theatre amplifier and set of speakers is going to blow away a sound bar. I think people who think "it all sounds the same" have never heard a really good stereo. I have an alright, but far from high end, stereo set up in a listening environment in my basement, and everyone I've ever listened to music with down there is blown away.