> The vast majority of newer Blurays use H.264, which is pretty efficient (much more than the other two).
Right; still quite a bit less efficient than H.265, though.
> One big downside of reencoding in HEVC is that for a moderate gain in compression (0-50% depending on the film), you considerably increase your playback requirements.
Yes, although this is becoming less true as more hardware offload support becomes available.
For example, Nvidia 750, 950-960, and 1030 are all capable of HEVC offload[1]. The latter can be had new for ~$85; the others are probably a bit harder to find but given they're older midrange cards at this point maybe they're a little cheaper.
> So even backing up the main feature of a UHD can easily run you 50+ GiB.
Sure, I don't think there's any economical way to reduce storage requirements of UHD significantly without defeating the point. On the other hand, I don't think the extra pixels really matter as much as higher color depth (10 or 12 bit) and fewer artifacts at lower resolution, unless you've got a home IMAX or something.
[1]: https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-decode-gpu-support...