Capitalism can work well when it's coupled into a virtuous circle of funding R&D to create new products and services to increase income to put back into more R&D.
At the moment it seems that a lot of companies are just trying to seek ever increasing rent extraction on existing products rather than investing in trying to innovate and relying on high barriers to entry to keep competition out.
I don't think it is that is more polished, it's just you pay for them to do the stuff you need to do yourself with reverse proxying, opening ports, securing stuff. This is only an issue if you are sharing outside your network of course.
I've not looked into it but presumably it's because whatever web server framework they are using might not be as bug free and battle tested as dedicated web server application like nginx so by limiting the actual web servers exposure you are limiting the attack surface.
They run their own full OS these days on under powered SoCs to cut costs. All so they can claim to be a "smart" TV until of course the flow of updates stops a year after manufacture and all the apps stop working. Then it's back to being dumb as well as being a massive security hole on your network.
That was a long winded way of saying you don't know what Jellyfin actually is or does. Mpv is a client, it only fills the role that the various Jellyfin clients perform and a better comparison would be against a heavier weight media player such as Kodi.
What you suggest works well enough if you have a reliable network link to share CIFS or NFS over, but what do you do when away from home on a rubbish link that doesn't have bandwidth to stream all your high quality bluray rips? You want transcoding in that situation.
Also, I'm a seasoned Unix sysadmin who knows his way around the cli and I can say with certainty this isn't for people who know the cli, it's for people who just want to prove you can do anything from the cli even if suboptimal.
Are you sure that's many people? Outside of the few tech savvy people I know, most lay people have no clue what h.264/5 are either. They know mp3 and that just means digital music to them.
It doesn't have to have an evolutionary narrative, it's part of the variation that evolution can act on though and what is beneficial or deleterious depends on the circumstances individuals and populations find themselves in.
If you are too young to have lived through the napster revolution it's very much a throwback to that kind of sharing so you get to experience p2p like it's the late 90s only with good network speeds. For an authentic experience limit your download to 56k.
As opposed to the "dunt werk on my machine" that was being replied to? To a bystander deciding to investigate Jellyfin for music themselves both points of view are useful are they not?
Capitalism can work well when it's coupled into a virtuous circle of funding R&D to create new products and services to increase income to put back into more R&D.
At the moment it seems that a lot of companies are just trying to seek ever increasing rent extraction on existing products rather than investing in trying to innovate and relying on high barriers to entry to keep competition out.