A much bigger problem than the compression format is the fact that biologists over-sequence. You don't need 500x coverage, trust me, please learn to design your experiments.
Maybe you don't need 500x coverage, and if you don't, then I'm glad you're not sequencing to that depth. But please don't tell other people they're doing something wrong when you don't understand their use cases.
Making the blanket statement that 500x coverage is generally not needed for any experiment is patently false.
I've built clinical liquid biopsy tests where it was a QC failure if particular sites of interest were under 5000x coverage. Sequencing such sites to only 500x coverage would be a waste of everybody's time, because it would be impossible to gain meaningful results from so little data.
If anything, I see the opposite problem much more frequently: People who cheap out on the sequencing depth, neutering their statistical power!