Netflix is trafficking in a commodity over which it cannot have monopolistic control. Take, for example, your own instance - licensing shows which used to be on Hulu.
Producing originals isn't something only NFLX has the expertise to do. AMC was home to some of the best shows of this century. No monopoly for NFLX there.
For NFLX to be spoken of at the same level as FB, Goog, and Amazon, I'd have thought they had an insurmountable moat - Social in the case of FB, search relevance for GOOG, and 2-day fulfillment for AMZN. When I don't see a monopoly, I start to wonder why NFLX is so loved by Wall Street and not treated as a commodity like any other content channel is.
I suspect NFLX will end up being just another dividend paying stock like a utility. That's not a failure at all but it isn't ever going to justify being gushed about along with the other companies in FAANG.
Back to your point about a service which lets me rent content - that would be true if they were truly a content aggregator which lets anyone including Hulu serve content to renters and kept a haircut for themselves. Amazon's Marketplace is a great example of service which is designed purely to act as a platform for 1st and 3rd party vendors. Obviously, right now, NFLX isn't interested in this.