which, incidentally, means they use up significantly more data/storage space and cost more money
All of this is very true, but this is the only issue I really disagree with here.
I am in an era where a good quality rip of a movie can be almost 50 gigabytes by itself. That means for every terabyte of storage, I can store just 20 of movies of this size.
Don’t even get my started on television series and how big those can balloon to with the same kind of encoding.
An entire collection of FLACs, thousands of albums worth, is still less than 500 gigabytes total, in other words half a terabyte. (My personal collection anyway)
I mean, the average size of one of my FLAC albums is around 200-300 megabytes. Even with the larger “hi-res” FLAC files you’re still not getting as obscenely big as movie and television files.
Sure, it takes up more space than an MP3 or a FLAC properly encoded to CD standards (my preferred choice, for the reasons outlined above), but realistically, the amount of space it takes up compared to those is negligible when compared to other types of media.
Storage and energy to operate storage has become incredibly cheap, especially when you’re dealing with smaller files like this.