I think Nintendo games might be the exception here. You can get a physical copy on release day, put it in and play immediately, and the quality is gonna be at least 8/10, probably higher.
Honestly the 1.2 TB I'm the early 90s is an insanely impressive figure to me. I mean in that era a gigabyte seemed like an obscene amount of data, the interat ran at less than 56 kbps, and I don't think I had a 1GB drive in my hime PC until almost the turn of the millennium. Sending and storing that much from venus is a huge accomplishment.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say I think this is done to prevent anticompetitive issues. If Google were to profit off of both its own product (youtube / yt music) and also require its competitors to pay it a % of revenue, it would potentially open them up to more anticompetitive lawsuits.
Just for clarity, they already switched protocols (Manifest v3), they just have continued to support the old format (v2) that allows unlock origin to work. They are discontinuing support for v2 next year.
What was the service you could upload your own. Playlist and songs and share with friends? Last.fm? Something like that, shit was awesome.