So you can drop all that traffic and the users are unimpacted... So why not just always drop that traffic and don't even bother writing the code to implement those features that clearly nobody cares about?
It's not that nobody cares; they're just less important. Obvious example is analytics. It helps Netflix deliver a better experience to their users, (video watchers and product placement advertisers -- whoever) but it isn't mission critical to making sure users can watch their content. If you miss some log data, that's not a huge deal. That doesn't mean you want to stop logging.
Some of the things they mentioned were also user impacting, like not being able to select a video's language, but less critical. You obviously still want that feature, but it's less important than being able to watch at all.
"unimpacted" isnt the case - it makes clear that some traffic is more critical-path than others and thus the prioritization.
"Clearly nobody cares about" - what? The whole point here is "people care most about video streaming" and less about the metadata etc that they lower in priority.
