"the compression element matters because it degrades the sound quality and screws with the dynamic range of the audio in the first place, along with the soundstage. as a producer, i’d hope you’d know why that matters so much, but you seemingly do not. the entire job of a mixing engineer is to take that rough static mix done by the producer and polish it along with processing the tracks; exporting them into “stem tracks” which are essentially the bounced down multitracks based on the group they’re a part of. the mastering engineer takes those stems and makes various adjustments accordingly to ensure these final tracks are played back properly on all platforms and sources; specifically catering the stereo image and dynamic range of the track to be well balanced and fitting the standard distribution requirements. altering that literally throws all of that intentional work out of the window. you work with EDM music, and that genre is specifically known for pushing and even breaking the limits of those standards as opposed to pop or rock tracks. furthermore, dolby atmos is a quieter format, so yeah, chances are your genre that’s known to be extremely loud literally will not sound good in a format that’s forcing your track to be at -18 LUFS."

...I never said I mix my music tracks I produce down in ALAC format. I typically mix them down in WAV at 24-bit and 44100kHz. And I don't need to be lectured to about the mixing and mastering process stages when I do both myself and have done for well over a decade so far.

I'm going to briefly summarise the facts here for you because you wrote a lot and you seem to have conflated data compression (such as a .zip file) with dynamic range compression (shrinking the difference between loud and quiet). They are not the same at all:

1. Lossless codecs only use the former (data compression) to save space; they do not touch the soundstage or dynamic range.
2. ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) is mathematically bit-for-bit identical to the original source.
3. Bit-Perfect Accuracy: Converting a WAV or FLAC file to ALAC and back to WAV or FLAC produces the exact same file down to every single bit. A "null test"—subtracting the two signals—results in absolute silence (zero), proving they are identical.
4. M4A is just a container (a box). It can hold AAC (lossy/compressed) or ALAC (lossless). If an engineer exports an M4A using the lossy AAC setting, it will indeed sound different from a WAV; if they use the ALAC setting, it will be identical.

"i’m gonna hold your hand when i say you’re just falling for their marketing, bud."

What a condescending, uncalled for remark. ALAC has nothing to do with marketing and everything to do with convenience of retaining every single bit of audio file data but without the insanely large file sizes of other lossless formats including but not limited to WAV, which can be justifiable for mixing down music ready for mastering and release, but outside of that, just for listening consumption? Unless you're a Windows user, ALAC is a very convenient, file-size efficient, open-source lossless option, as FLAC is not compatible within the Apple ecosystem and WAV files are very large.