I stand corrected, thanks for taking the time to write an informative comment. I haven’t ripped a CD in like 15 years :P

In the end, I found I don’t really care that much, since lossy Bluetooth works well enough for earbuds on the go, and good old cables are still available for more serious listening.

Plus, the truth is that most people can’t tell the difference between lossy and lossless without doing A/B testing, and some can’t tell even with that

Audio CDs contain 44.1kHz 16-bit PCM. If you got FLACs out you transcoded them, and transcoding from lossy to lossless is generally undesirable

EDIT: I stand corrected, I forgot that PCM is not a codec.

They don’t want to protect, they want exclusivity.