> Just personally, I have seen little evidence (personally, professionally, or academically) that there is any advantage for lossless audio for consumer applications

I think the advantage of lossless audio is for archival: rip once, archive as lossless; then you can reencode your library with the latest and greatest lossy encoders over time, or just use the lossless if your player can manage it, cpu and storage is less of a limiting factor for players than 20 years ago.

I don't know how many people are actually managing their libraries these days though, so I dunno if makes a huge difference.