I'm assuming that when you're at as large of a scale as Netflix, if you were to provide bitrates like Apple does, it would probably collapse most of the interne

I'm assuming that when you're at as large of a scale as Netflix, if you were to provide bitrates like Apple does, it would probably collapse most of the internet backbone. I think Netflix and Youtube already use something like half of the internet's bandwidth. Now imagine if they just tripled that overnight. Though I guess there's a difference between allowing the user to switch to it vs making it default. Youtube lowered the default to 480 to help with congestion during the pandemic, but you can still manually still. I assume 99% of users use the default which is why they can get away with it. But it would be kinda silly for Netflix to provide 48mbps but only to those who know to enable it.