What am I missing?

"CD quality" is heading toward being the 'base quality' for digital. You can already get higher quality then CD. Spotify and others are well below CD quality. 

I agree with you, the Music industry doesn't want us to own music, why would they? They can either sell you music once, or charge you forever, basically. They use to do it by going from 78's, to LP's and 45's, then 8-track/cassettes, then CD's and now  'higher quality' 180 gram LP's for old recordings. 

Notice I left out digital in that list, and it's because of MP3's and Napster (Free music!) that they needed to figure out a way to make money. They tried various coding/decoding methods, but that failed (Sony had a real bad time with it). They finally figured out they could make good money on subscriptions (renting as you put it). 

Personally, I like owning my own music and buy used CD's or buy Hi-Res when available for my Aurrender, but I bet they eventually kill both, and most people will never own any music. Records will probably still be made, people pay big money for new recordings. And they don't make the best digital copies, so it's really not worth it make 'illegal' copies. 

This is my take on it. If someone has a different take, I'm fine with that. I just look back at history and this to me is how we got here and where it's going.

At least with my rig, I often get my finest fidelity via Qobuz’s’ Hi-Rez streams. A good half the time it beats out what I get from my LPs.

Though their streams aren’t officially Hi-Rez, Idagio’s streams can deliver me excellent sound, as well. I also have to say that my Sony CD/SACD player sometimes beats my record player, too, at least by a nose. What can I say? My analog rig ain’t bad, either -- updated SOTA Sapphire turntable with Alphason arm, Hana cartridge and Moon phono stage. To be sure, none of my components truly explore the frontier of what is the best of the best, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the heck out of the sound my components provide.

Also, oddly, I just don’t care enough that, when I stream, I’m only renting the material, not owning it.

A huge part of my youth was spent hunting for LPs in record shops and in magazines and later for CDs and SACDs in shops and online.

Anyone coming into Hi-End Audio now is blessed that they have millions of albums to choose from for a small monthly fee.

With the exception of bootlegs everything is available and then some. Owning music really doesn't make any sense anymore, unless you already own it.

Barring some dystopian future where the internet goes down we'll be scraping through the remnants of humanity for CDs or even better SSD drives.

The ownership (or the lack thereof) criticism is not valid anymore. If you own a streamer and local storage/server, you can always buy and download your music if you like. I stream mostly with Qobuz but I have ripped most of my CDs and have downloaded many DSD and other high quality recordings that I own. If anything, you get the best of both worlds.

Yep, still have option to download if you feel the need to own. Another consideration for me has been storage. I have well over 3.5k cd's and same with vinyl, I have this physical media stored all over my house, total pain, don't need or want any more physical media.