Any other versions one should take themselves (say one of the MP3 variants), that have any tangible benefits?
I know that I shouldn’t do this but I download the FLAC version and compress it to Opus 192kbps. It’s very high quality with the size of an MP3. I won’t be able to change the format and recompress it later, but I don’t really mind.
But yeah, as storage space & bandwidth are less and less an issue, if FLAC is fully supported across the board, the scale should be tipped. My worry comes from we not quite being there yet.
Sometimes I'm just baffled by how broken the Apple ecosystem can seem.
There’s a handy app called XLD (X Lossless Decoder) that will convert from FLAC to ALAC (and probably back) in a couple clicks if you need it. Lossless means I don’t really need to care whether my music is in an equivalent format, but I will admit it’s a bit silly.
FLAC is great because it's future proof. You can transcode to other formats as needed but keep a lossless archive.
On the second point, ALAC works just as well as FLAC in that regard.
There's already a whole bunch of them