I should really put some background and context around my ire toward the Tidal/MQA partnership. IMV they are really stretching the limits of marketing to describe the service as it currently stands.
Up front, I will say I don't like MQA for all sorts of reasons. But the least of these reasons is SQ. The biggest issues I have are around marketing vs reality, lossy codecs claiming to be otherwise, latent DRM concerns and that it's a solution to a problem that never existed.
However, this is about Tidal and their policies primarily, so onward.
Back when Tidal was a 2-tier service, they announced their tie-up with MQA. However as anyone using Tidal with Roon could see (via the "Versions" tab and in the signal path display), the MQA versions of albums were coexisting peacefully alongside the original, lossless FLAC versions of the albums. So there was always a choice for the end user. Those that preferred the sound of MQA, invested in the licensed hardware, or had some weird Bob Stuart worship fetish (believe me, they exist) could happily choose that version. Those that wanted to retain the original FLAC versions in their library could also do so. Happy days.
Then something quite insidious started happening. Without making any announcement, Tidal started to pull the FLAC versions of albums completely from their platform, leaving only the MQA version available on the HiFi tier. Likewise, many new releases on their platform are now only presented in lossy MQA format, no FLAC lossless version available. "Well so what?", you might ask.
Even if you can't hear the difference (and to be fair in a car this is highly likely), I have serious problems with the marketing of Tidal's service.
To be clear, an MQA recording that doesn't go through any of their software or hardware renderers ("unfolding"), e.g. in the car, is a lossy recording equivalent to about 13 bits (it's still lossy with a full MQA setup but we'll skim over that here). This is not a "HiFi" tier service by any stretch. It's a lossy codec cleverly marketed under the banner of "Masters", "provenance" and "time alignment" (all bs, by the way).
If it was marketed as a high quality lossy codec, ideal for low bandwidth environments (like a car!), that would be OK. But then high bit rate .aac and .ogg are already very good, so there's really no point.