The entire class of followers of Audiophoolery will never go away. I guess that if they have an enjoyment from listening to prerecorded music (etc) and that they have a massive and bottomless to most of us disposable income for such superfluous toys then i am not one to complain as long as they are not my neighbours cranking up the system in the wee hours.
I made the stupid move once to enter a HiFi AudioPhool Retail outlet (purely to see if there were any tube/valved systems and what the retailed for) hidden away in a quaint back alley of a busy city. There were other customers there one of whom eventually spoke to me and the conversation soon came to a point that it was all about the 'Sound'.
With 40+ years in electronics and much in Studio Broadcast maintenance i took this 'believer' on a merry-go-round finishing with the classic that my ears are able to discern the mode by which the mains electricity operating any topend system has been generated, either by Hydro-turbine, Gas fired, Geo-thermal or Solar.... The chap agreed entirely...
Proof you can get these people to believe anything....
I have a similar background to you, & have the same attitude to the "Golden Ears" brigade.
On two separate occasions, though,I have been caught out when someone I had dismissed as a member of that group actually did hear something different.
The first occasion was when I was employed at a Manned country TV/FM site.
One bloke maintained that there was a phase error between the Stereo channels of the ABCFM transmission.
Nobody else could hear it, though in fairness, we were listening in the quite noisy transmitter control room & he used Stereo headphones.
The ABC, unlike some others, sent baseband L & R out on the feed.
Because they had many remote sites, they, in conjunction with Telecom Aust, inserted very low level 15kHz pilot tones on each channel.
The device which monitored these was set up to determine loss of signal, not phase error, but it gave us something to look at.
And ,yes, there was a phase error.
It turns out that part of the feed was via landline.
One side of the Stereo pair failed, & the local Telecom Techs re-routed it via an extra 160km work-around.
They were more used to finding feeds for Mono AM.
The next occasion was at a Commercial TV Station, where someone reported low level "white noise" on the TV sound, on one particular Aural exciter.
We checked, couldn't hear it, or see anything with a Spectrum Analyser.
Called him a "Golden ear".
Ultimately, the exciter got worse,spreading the noise across the pass band.