Thinking about this, and the reasonable argument below that Netflix have also produced a number of prestige films and series that are genuinely great, I wonder if the production pipeline has a side effect: flattening the quality signal.

That is, it used to be (80s/90s) a lot more obvious what the prestige/not prestige boundary was. Cheap TV content (soaps etc) was shot on video, expensive content shot on film. Now everything looks the same. Perhaps the one remaining effort signal was lighting, but Netflix seem to have chosen very flat bright lighting styles for everything now. Bad news for us chiaroscuro lovers. And even when directors do try to do that, they've often over-estimated the HDR so you get the opposite: an entire series which is too dark.