I'm not representative of the typical consumer in most ways, I'd say. I have always valued having a large physical media collection. I want the original, with artwork or booklet, and I want authorized copies (so I wasn't interested in torrents or any of that).
I did own one tiny portable MP3 player, and that's the only time I ever made lossy copies of any music. I bought the player to use at the gym, because I didn't want to take my 3rd Gen iPod Nano there. The Nano was a Christmas gift from my boss the year that model came out, and I only put Apple Lossless (I don't think I thought of it as ALAC or knew it by that name at that time) copies of my favorite Leontyne Price albums on it. It only had a capacity of 8GB, I think. It might be in a drawer somewhere still. The tiny MP3 player was from SanDisk, maybe the Sansa Clip+ and since I only wanted it for working out at the gym, I put pop and rock music on it. Casual music for casual gym listening, so I wasn't worried about lossless. I think I used 192 kbps, not sure what encoder. Probably whatever Roxio's media software had at the time. LAME? I don't know. Those lossy files were only for that purpose, everything else I ever ripped was in FLAC, ALAC, or Windows Media Lossless which is what I used on a work computer starting in 2004. I just looked that codec up, and apparently I was an "early adopter." I guess I figured Windows had a lossless compression long before that.
One reason I avoided lossy files is that when I heard you could put vast amounts of music on a single CD, I put a whole opera on one (2 CDs worth of music). When I played it back, there were all these little clicks or other brief sounds throughout the music. That's when I learned that the early lossy formats were incapable of gapless playback, so it was useless for the majority of my music. I never tried to see if I could hear the difference between lossless and 320kbps lossy within a track, because the non-gapless nature made the whole thing a non-starter no matter how good it might be otherwise. For pop or rock that has songs with clear beginnings and endings, it's okay, but that's it. I was always surprised that I seldom read any complaints anywhere about the butchering of playback, because outside of opera and certain other classical music, there are actually a fair number of famous rock albums that transition smoothly from one song into the next. Maybe most people don't mind the discontinuity. Even now, the only lossy codec I know of that allows true gapless tracks is Ogg Vorbis. But there are also a lot of media players and streamers that don't playback gaplessly, even if the music files are encoded correctly. Pathetic. lol
All that said, I can't imagine anyone needing lossy nowadays, between devices with huge capacities, streaming speeds, processing speed, etc. Lossy is beneficial for some of the rights holders, because it's probably easier to sell the same music again in a better format later. I never bought anything from iTunes. Why get lossy crap when the CD was often the same price or cheaper? Then if I want a lossy version for on-the-go, I have the option of doing that myself from the CD, in whichever codec I like, at whatever rate. My home internet is actually pretty slow for the times, but I can still stream Netflix in very nice quality, and had no problem with CD-quality streams from Qobuz, never a glitch or interruption. With crummy internet, I can see problems with uninterrupted streams of 24/192 "high res," but I'm not sold on the necessity of 24/192 for anything other than studio use. The CDs I have that don't sound great are clearly held back by the source material and mastering choices. Aged and poorly produced recordings can sound like crap, and then certain record labels had a habit of effing everything up. None of that is due to limitations in 16/44.1, though.