This guy overthought it... use Plex, so you can stream it. Don't be syncing large folders of files everywhere with git. And if you don't like Plex, there's a half dozen other comparable software titles that will stream audio.
As for "smaller files" fuck that shit. For the longest time, I went with 320kbps mp3s. I was limited in the space I could dedicate to music (a few hundred gigabytes). But now? Storage is only cheaper. Get FLAC for everything. And the cloud? I think that's called "someone else's computer" or so I've heard. Stream/sync it from home.
Don't forget also that re-encoding often happens with wireless streaming technologies such as Bluetooth. The effects of this are much less well studied. Bluetooth has more chance of sounding fine with a lossless source like FLAC.
Agreed - I have my collection encoded in Opus on my phone's SD card.
Tempted to do the same for my in-home setup to lock the sample rate at 48KHz - my tired old home server struggles to down-sample the higher resolution FLACs that I have before throwing it to SnapCast.
One day you might want to transcode - compression artifacts may well not be audible in normal use, different compression algorithms drop different bits though and so the result of transcoding between compressed formats is quite often an audible (even to my distinctly non-golden ears) loss of quality. Thus FLAC (as a reliable lossless format) - or even WAV (I chose to take the 2:1, 3:1 compression of FLAC over WAV personally).
While true... I figured out how little I was saving by not doing FLAC. And there wasn't a point in saving that storage. I've got plenty, and that's with 5 bays still empty in the Synology.
Besides the fact that storage is cheap, FLAC has a more ample metadata model than MP3 and I'm already used to working with the toolchain for that metadata.
As for "smaller files" fuck that shit. For the longest time, I went with 320kbps mp3s. I was limited in the space I could dedicate to music (a few hundred gigabytes). But now? Storage is only cheaper. Get FLAC for everything. And the cloud? I think that's called "someone else's computer" or so I've heard. Stream/sync it from home.