You are overthinking this way too much, to the point that it is sounding like you are purposefully creating out-of-context problems to justify your way too long rant.

As the kids these days say: just take the L, man.

I completely disagree. The rant is a problem but the complaint about reencoding is quite valid.

It’s a classic “forest for the trees” scenario. The use case 90% of the time for these tools is “I have a format problem and I need something to solve it quickly.” Rarely do they care if it’s lossless or not.

Anyone who knows what lossless vs. lossy means and when it matters knows what tools to look for and what the limitations of each tool are.

The average person can easily understand "the copy looks worse when it could look identical". The issue is not even thinking to check.

And I bet most of them do care, even if it's not caring a lot.

If you think a developer creating something /they/ thought would be useful (or even just a fun exercise) is a waste of time because there are “better” options already available, then you really are so out of touch with what developing software means that you are in absolutely no position to make such judgment.