I agree with some of your points, but forgive an old geezer like me for completely disagreeing with a few others (and yeah you did insult the 30somethings but you will get that when you get to that age).

The point of the story was that Disney animated films lose some of their appeal when they get a straight-to-streaming release and that is proven again and again. They lose the marketing push, the media coverage, the exposure that theatrical releases get, so they are inevitably seen as "second-rate" to begin with based on general perception alone. This has nothing to do with their artistic quality, just as you said. It has to do with the way a film is promoted and the amount of time and money that's spent on marketing it.

For the mainstream audience, of any age, this is just the way things are. "Lightyear" will gather more traction in June because of its theatrical release than e.g. "Soul" did in December 2020 when it got released on D+, although the latter might be the better film of the two. What streaming does, in essence, is give a film that has a theatrical release a second "push" when it appears on a streaming platform. Every film studio or streaming service would ideally prefer to have both "pushes" for its films.

Then you have to consider the financial side. Theatrical releases are revenue streams, so whoever releases a movie straight to streaming loses that money. That loss will be part of the equation that determines, along with its cost and whether it brought new subscribers to the streaming platform or not, whether this movie was successful.

If Disney or Netflix or whoever else finds two or three such releases unsuccessful, then they will either cut down on the number of such releases or the budget for future such releases or both. End result: fewer or worse such releases, which leads to a spiral effect every time such a release takes place.

The example of "Fresh" that you mention proves nothing. All studios, film distributors and now all streaming services go to movie festivals in order to check out movies they can get the exclusive rights to distribute for. Then bidding wars begin. So Hulu got those Fresh rights instead of Netflix or a Hollywood studio. Dozens of films got picked up that way in the last 5 years or so. It does not prove anything.

You are right that it makes sense for media companies to release some of their content directly to their streaming platforms. For a variety of reasons. But it is usually - if they have the option, which they did not during the first and second wave of COVID-1 9 - the movies they think that it would not bring in all that much revenue theatrically. Which is not fair to the movies and their creators, because they worked for them with the same dedication others did for movies that got their theatrical releases.

So Disney and everyone else will have to either recognize that and give all movies the releases they deserve or just establish "tiers of quality" (and budget) for full-blown releases and exclusive streaming releases. Doing things in a way that's irrational and convoluted and unpredictable ultimately doesn't help anyone.

PS. Oh, and "tons of really good movies come out to Netflix every year"...? I honestly thought your comment did not deserve an answer based on that sentence alone. But I did it anyway because some of us old geezers feel that we're not giving back to society if we just keep our opinions (and experience) to ourselves. We are odd like that!