(I actually expected a much worse reply) Nah I willingly interpreted what you said in the most extreme way possible. But in my mind there's something of a ceiling when it comes to noticable improvements in audio quality, especially when compared to visuals, and it's much lower than lossless. Besides, encoding is far from the only determining factor of audio quality. I think now, as discussed in other threads, the primary factor of ballooning file size is sheer quantity. We want more dialogue, more varied and adaptive music, more immersive soundscapes - and there's no trick to achieving this other than more content, meaning more disk space. Maybe one day we'll find an audio compression algorithm that will perform miracles, but until then audio still forms a significant portion of any game's install, compressed or not.

This seems to be a point across all media at the moment, people watching/listening on sub-par equipment then complaining because the content is designed for higher quality gear.

"This film was too dark on my laptop screen" when it's designed for a HDR enabled screen, "Nolan's sound was mangled though my TV speakers" when it's designed for at least a decent DTS set up. Etc. The same thing now seems to have infected games, "why is this 2023 game not designed for my 2018 rig and it's limitations".