I get that that is what you are saying is a part of the quality of sleep experience, but those qualities are not really about duration, you either have those privileges or you don't. If you are lucky enough to have a biological clock requiring less hours per night to enjoy them fully, that's ok.
I would agree though that to forgo those qualities intentionally over an extended timeframe is a curious choice.
I think some people, specially nowadays, live in a very conceptual world inside their minds, and anything that they don't understand or deem unrelated to it, they compartmentalize as disposable, where in reality they're being a bit childish in how narrow they view the world.
I find that the 16 hours I have after clocking 8 hours are infinitely more "awake" than the 19 hours I get when I only clock 5.
Which is basically what the sleep researchers say. The bottom line is that there's clearly a tipping point, not the same for everyone of course but averaging around 7 hours, below which "wakefulness" (and functioning metabolism in general) experienced throughout the rest of the day rapidly starts to tank.
Lots of my family members are in their late 80's now and I really wouldn't want to exchange say a decade of their life with a decade of mine if that means I will only live to 75 instead of 85 or 90. The number of people in their 80's that I know that I would want to exchange with is vanishingly small, most of them are going from one health issue to another, whereas most people in their 70's that I know, even the ones that lived relatively unhealthy are still going quite strong.