Your assumption that “using reflection means the code is wrong” seems a bit extreme, at least in .Net. Every time you interact with types, you use reflection. Xml and Json serialization/deserialization uses reflection, and also Entity Framework. If you use mocking in test you are using reflection.

We have an excel export functionality on our sites that uses reflection because we can write 1 function and export any types we want, thanks to reflection.

The only reason that comes to mind to use x264 is to avoid transcoding for older clients. Also Firefox does not support HEVC so it always needa transcoding (at least on Jellyfin)

Sadly some clients (nvidia shield tv) does not support AV1 :( right now I’m encoding some AV1 content I have back to HEVC just because of that.

Yes it is!

You park outside the city center, so the center is basically car free, beside some commercial vehicles to bring food to restaurants for example.