There is some truth to that, if your goal is not to sell music at the highest possible quality, but to extract the greatest amount of money possible from some people's wallets.
If you follow the video and website link on the first page, you will see that 16 bit / 44.1 KHz for distribution is more than good enough for any human ears; 48 KHz was useful in a time of analogue filters but doesn't make any difference anymore. More bits doesn't harm or hurt (except for pointless use of storage), while higher frequencies actively hurt.
What makes a real difference is: 1. The quality of the master. 2. Not doing anything stupid while creating a digital master (that's what "made for iTunes" is essentially about). 3. Dithering and shaped dithering to get the quality far beyond what a human can hear. 4. For lossy compression, using decent software with high quality settings instead of low quality defaults. 5. Decent digital/analog converters. 6. Decent audio equipment for listening. Like $100 headphones instead of $20 headphones that are sold for $200.
Must of the "hurt" the music goes through is by being processed in one way or another for release after the various takes are in. That's by far where most the loss of fidelity occurs and well, there is no real fix for 99% of the music we hear out there.
For a few genre (Classical, Jazz, Blues, etc, many genre where they really on the instruments, including human voice's, subtlety to shine trough), they touch the live recording as little as possible, possibly even having everyone in the same room to do it
and there you'd get the "real thing" (tm).
Then you assume you got top notch equipment at both end to record the stuff and then play it back... Not likely.
For nearly 100% of listening equipment/environment out there, you don't even get the best CD level reproduction let alone something better. Sometimes, people think what they're earing is linked to HD audio, when in fact they're just hearing proper CD level reproduction (which is so rare that they are amazed by it!).
So, even if you have a golden ear person, it would have to actually know the difference and actually care about the difference between CD and above and actually listen to genre where it makes a difference at all recorded in the best way and played on the best system.
Knowing the difference is important... People can't really know what the proper sound of something is unless they've actually heard it live and quite recently. Our brain is not that great at retaining this info with precision unless you're a trained musician. So, for most people it's their own preferences that's at play as a reference and not the actual original recording.
Anyway, the Golden eared person with a musical background listening to perfect appropriate material in perfect conditions
is a crazy small number.
For those people, hey, I'm all for them getting the best experience ever.
I myself just love hearing Jazz on the best system I can afford in quiet conditions, while I can hear pop/dance/most indie/hiphop music on whatever music system is available without blinking (because it's already processed to death anyway and it doesn't matter much).
Of course, there is a certain number of people who see value in the imaginary....
And that use case is probably higher (just like people swearing off gluten even though they have no sound medical reason to do so).
