What am I missing?

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.

CDs are not in disfavor in my home.  Not even close.