TL;DR:

Modern actors are incompetent self entitled imbeciles with no theatre training whatsoever who mumble their words because they think it sounds cooler.

Directors are incompetent self entitled imbeciles who believe unintelligible dialogue is more realistic, but also that drowning it in way too loud music makes the film more emotional, that sound recording equipment gets in the way of filming and should be kept as far away as possible from the action, and that if they know what the script says (because they've read it a thousand times) so will the audience.

Producers (and the aforementioned actors and directors) are cheap lazy incompetent self entitled imbeciles who'll refuse to film another take claiming the useless shit they just filmed can be fixed in post (it can't, it's shit).

Theatres fired all competent projectionists and are now manned by lazy incompetent untrained teenagers who have no idea how to properly operate and set up the sound systems and will more often than not play the films at the wrong volume.

Streaming sites overcompress and overprocess (and overprice) the audio into an even more unintelligible noisy mess.

“Smart” TVs overprocess it even more on top of that, making it even worse. And you're probably using the wrong settings anyway.

In short: the audio is intentionally crap, becomes even crappier in every step between filming and your ears (except, according to people working in sound processing, the sound processing step, but there's only so much you can do to fix crappy digital audio).

“bemoaning directors' over-reliance on music as ‘pushing emotion’ on audiences”

One of my pet peeves. It’s usually the sign of a poorly made movie if you feel you have to lay on the music because actors performances aren’t enough to convey the emotions of a scene.

Really though the last mentioned issue in the article is the main problem. (Gotta get you to scroll to the end!) The movies are mixed for a theater sound system and most don’t get remixed for television.

That's a brilliant article.

Assuming facts are accurate, and there's not much missing info, it explains so much about why I've consistently hated the sound on streaming services. Even with my full home theater setup instead of just stereo, there's flaws that stand out compared to dvd or bluray.

Take the opening scene of evil dead. Well, I can't recall if it's 1 or 2 that has this particular scene. But it's when the swing is banging against the cabin. On DVD the sound is balanced roughly right; the banging isn't out of line with the dialogue, no need to mess with volume. But streaming? Again, I can't even remember what service it was on, but that banging was absurdly loud compared to the dialogue, and so were the effects. It was a horrible experience to a movie I've seen literally hundreds of times over the years.

The new dialogue Enhancer feature on the AppleTV 4K works quite nicely on almost everything.

A picture you can hear.