YIFY/YTS, the trash talk & quality. What am I not seeing?

For anyone scoffing - "well you should use xyz instead" .... I'm pretty new to all this anyway so I don't even know about "xyz" in order to use it. I just know what I come across.

I'm just bored passing the time. Looked at a couple movies & often the file sizes around 1.5GB-ish are tagged up as YIFY so I Google YIFY, how others view these YIFY tagged files, so on & so forth.

So I'm surprised to then learn it officially ended around 2015? And there's a lot of hate on it. Poor quality, much better out there, etc etc.

Now if you don't give AF about file sizing, then sure, go out & get your downloads at 100GB per movie, who cares. Space matters to me though.

But more than that, I've experimented with different file sizes/qualities to see if there's a noticeable difference from the TV screen to my eyeballs.

And I don't see it massively.

I don't like to go much below 1.5GB because in my head I imagine the quality will then get noticeably worse.

So I've done 1080p at the 1.5GB-2.5GB up to perhaps 3.0GB at a push range.

I've done supposed 4K at around 8GB-10GB which I later learned (told you I was noob) isn't really 4K.

So then I've downloaded 60GB-80GB files tagged up as 4K.

These are then put on my Nvidia Shield TV Pro which is then watched on a 58" Panasonic 4K TV and I sit perhaps 2.5mtr from that TV.

Now if I compare the 80GB 4K file to the 1.5GB file and sit there examining frames then sure I can see a difference. But who watches movies like that? Not me anyway.

So for just sitting back, relaxing & watching, I don't really notice a huge difference in quality. Certainly not to the point where I go - oh this is shit. I have AI upscaling turned on on the Shield so I don't know if that's making a difference but yeah.

So why am I not seeing a difference that everyone else is? Is it the TV? The distance I'm sitting? The AI upscaling? Or is it just simply I have shit eyes?