Here's another speculation: A lot of movies, etc are mastered for surround sound and the single downmix is pretty terrible. It's actually quite a rabbit hole i

Here's another speculation: A lot of movies, etc are mastered for surround sound and the single downmix is pretty terrible. It's actually quite a rabbit hole in the ffmpeg forums. But basically the non-front channels end up contributing too much volume and end up drowning out spoken voice a lot of the time. I know this happens on BD, but I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix + co are using the same source, and 20-somethings probably don't have large places with surround sound systems.