re: How long before 4K physical discs are obsolete?

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Why?

And the answer shouldn't be "because you can download them illegally much easier"

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well you can definitely find much better copies than you'll ever create yourself.

Do you feel less illegal circumventing DVD/blu-ray anticopy measures on disks you own vs getting a proper rip somewhere else?

4k streaming will never look better than 4k physical discs due to compression. I love physical media personally.

Not for a while. No streaming service delivers true high fidelity 4K yet

-Buy yourself a NAS an plug it into your home network
-Rip your movies from disc.
-Setup a media server such as Plex, better yet some NAS devices come with built-in Plex.

Well, count me as a disc defender. For the past 20 years I've purchased tons of stuff. My tastes veer towards vintage material, and I've accumulated at least over 400 tv-themed dvd-sets and well over 1500 movies. Have an empty, spare bedroom to house this library, so space hasn't been a problem. My collection is large enough now that I frankly have more than I could ever re-watch in my remaining lifetime. I'm thrilled with owning all this, and having so much material at my fingertips.

I've never been particularly keen on relying on broadcast/cable/streaming, as you're so subject to their whims. Much of what I like is really old and obscure things (going back to silent movies), and none of these options are particularly stellar in this regard. Add to all this the whole PC-woke mania going on and getting worse every year, from protests to squelch Charlie Chan movie airings, to syndication removals of episodes of "Beverly Hillbillies" (where Granny is waving a Confederate flag), to TCM's obvious shadow-banning of various old films they used to run. Just about anything 'vintage' seems to contain something that will elicit conniption fits with the younger generation of wokesters. And these are the very people now filling in the ranks of the HR departments of all these big-media conglomerates, which controls the content. Just looking at the writing on the wall, I find having a disc library the best and practically only way to go. Others with different interests and tastes might arrive at an opposite conclusion.

It’s my profession so I know what I’m talking about here. Discs do not have to compress in picture quality because it is not streaming via a Wi-Fi connection. I’m not saying streaming will look like potato quality, hell 90% of people probably don’t even care. But on a technical frames per second aspect, discs are far superior than streaming. Again this is not an opinion, but a common sense fact.

To get more into the nitty-gritty, I think an appeal (for me) in maintaining a physical-media library of discs is the fact I'm not left 'reliant' on others. Certainly not the vagaries of a big, all-controlling corporation. Those studio giants have never liked the paradigm of people 'owning' copies of their works, going back to the early-VHS days. And, they're doing all they can to revert people to back away from this, into a continuing rate-payment system. Besides being just reliant to corporations and their fee systems and PC-related bannings, I'm also a little wary about things like wars and cyber-wars in the future, which could bring down much of the satellite/internet grid, and render things inaccessible. True, that's on the more paranoid end of the spectrum, but it's often crossed my mind.

I think a lot of the fear and wariness over this 'reliance on others' has to do with some generational experiences. I remember in the pre-dvd, pre-vhs, pre-cable days, when I'd catch some old movie rerun on a local station, which I might have liked. Say something like "King Kong," or maybe some neat Randolph Scott western. Might have really loved them. And I'd be dying to see them again. But year after year goes by, and they never reappear on local-tv. Many times I remember having to wait ten, twelve, fifteen years or more to finally get a chance to see them again. Those were long, long, exasperating waits. You can't imagine how much you find yourself thirsting to see something again. So when VHS and then DVD arrive, you can actually OWN these things, and hold them in your hands, and watch them any time you want. It was glorious! But one thing that NEVER leaves you... that grinding memory of being completely unable to see some favorite film or tv-series for years and years. That disquieting feeling still gnaws. Never goes away. So, it's just impossible to put all this in the hands of others, putting faith in outside corporate factors, cultural trends, global developments, and such. It makes one pretty darned devoted to physical hardware, that you can own, touch, hold in your hands.

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hey're pretty much obsolete for me now because I don't even have a DVD or Blu-Ray player connected to my TV anymore, I just stream everything.

I do acknowledge your point about being vulnerable to internet troubles but

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You need to watch I Am Legend. I recommend it on 4K UHD DVD.