I also went through the phase where I thought I was an audiophile/videophile and everything I collected needed to be in ultra high quality. Eventually I realized it was stupid and now I spend a third as much money on storage and still have perfectly fine media that I have no issues with in practice despite the flaws I’m supposed to see in theory.

you’ll do nothing but bloat the file size

That’s very wrong. Going from h.264 to h.265 cuts file size down to 25-50% of the original. That’s what the HE is for in HEVC.