I really wish they had to advertise streams at bitrate and not resolution.

Bitrate still won’t tell you how bad the encoding is. There can be dramatic differences at the same or inverse bitrate.

This is true for amateurs encoding video files to be pirated, but for the mega corps, sending more bits costs more money.

Many years ago, I had a couple drinks with a guy from Netflix who worked on their video compression processes, and he fully convinced me they're squeezing every last drop out of every bit they send down the pipes. The quality is not great compared to some other streaming services, but it's actually kind of amazing how they're able to get away with serving such tiny files.

Anyway, I think we can expect these companies to mostly max out the resultant video quality of their bitstreams, and showing the average bitrate of their pricing tiers would be a great yardstick for consumers.

Netflix's main audience is general public who still cannot differentiate between mbps and MBps.

for us nerds there is hidden stats for nerds option.

https://blog.sayan.page/netflix-debug-mode/

millibits per second is awfully slow.

While this is true, looking at it sometimes has quality so bad that I think the displayed resolution is just a complete lie.

YouTube does this. When I open a video the quality is set to Auto by default. It'll also show the "actual" quality next to it, like "Auto 1080p". Complete lie. I see this and see the video looks like 480p, manually change to 1080p and it's instantly much better. The auto quality thing is a flat out lie.