There are tradeoffs. IIRC Netflix uses software encoders and they work pretty hard to squeeze the maximum quality for a given bitrate. Makes sense for their use case. OTOH, for like video calls, certain kinds of archiving, in general cases with few or no views, it makes sense to use hardware encoding even if it means compromised image quality.
Sure, there are many use cases and Netflix generally has streams with high quality and few artifacts.
Real time video communications are going to go for fast low bitrates and that's more or less expected.
In other cases where encoders have no real time constraint, eg pirate torrents and youtube alternate versions, there are multiple tiers of quality - for a given resolution (say 720p) and bit rate rate | file size the offerings can be split by time spent encoding, quick and shitty to slow and few visible quirks.
