I agree that it's certainly overkill for listening sake, and that decent mp3/aac/opus encodes are generally indistinguishable in quality to a proper "lossless"

I agree that it's certainly overkill for listening sake, and that decent mp3/aac/opus encodes are generally indistinguishable in quality to a proper "lossless" format. That said, I still really do like having high bitdepth/sample rate audio available for download. Storage space is cheap and as physical CDs are getting phased out I don't want to be in a world where the best you can acquire is the minimal viable quality. If space is at a premium lossless audio with overkill quality can be transcoded to a smaller compressed format at 10s to 100s times realtime. Additionally it means should better compression schemes come out in the future you can reap the benefits of them. I had a lot of old CD rips from the early 2000s in 96kbps WMA and that was regrettable. As a scifi speculation for fun if in the future there were augmentations that improved human's hearing ability or effective brain links which could transmit audio more effectively than our ever deteriorating ears we'd want the best possible audio signal to feed into that.