Eh, it's more of a boiling the frog situation. The quality for 1080p video has gone down a LOT over the past 5 years. It's hard to notice for general-purpose vi

Eh, it's more of a boiling the frog situation. The quality for 1080p video has gone down a LOT over the past 5 years. It's hard to notice for general-purpose videos, but speciality videos (in my case, Starcraft2 replays) with non-standard content or high complexity (some slow motion videos of chaotic systems) just immediately collapse into noise. It's been nearly impossible to see invisible units in Starcraft2 replays on 1080p for a long time now, but that didn't used to be the case. YouTube has spent a lot on improving the compression algorithms to save money, and they've maintained 90% of the quality for most content, but the edge cases have seen 50%+ drop in visible quality. 4k completely fixes these problems and has very conservative (expensive) compression, but too many content creators still don't take advantage of that and produce only in 1080p. When 1080p came out on YouTube, it was much, much less compressed than it is now. So they did take it away for non-premium users. They just did it slowly over a long timescale.