I understand your point and clearly see that LLMs cannot be compared to audio ... but ...

Back when I was a kid, music, audio and sound systems had high quality as a standard.

Nowadays people listen to music mostly with bluetooth headphones which basically recompress an already compressed audio signal to send them in low quality. Also, it is more and more difficult to find OK stereos that play music in good quality. Either, you have to pay very high prices for overpriced "audiophile" equipment, or you are stuck with cheap chinese MP3 players.

Yet, society and markets have spoken. Sometimes society is happy to accept marginally worse products in exchange of price and convenience.