If you're willing to use freezers you can even stock up for quite a long time (some places will even let you pick the cow and process it for you and give you all the meat).

Where I live it’s not better. The average piece of meat comes from a slice of hell in some feedlot or crowded enclosure, labelling laws make it look okay, and people carry on and eat it. Butchers selling nicer meat have variable suppliers and, when I was eating meat, I’d notice over time that supplier quality was gradually decreasing and never increasing. Like they started with these great ideals and eventually had to give in and be able to reliably get a product and a decent margin off of it. Meat is a major casualty of the race to the bottom.