Titanfall shipped uncompressed audio on purpose to cut out audio decompression CPU usage. You can disagree with the decision, but it wasn't an accident or negligence.
That wouldn’t help people whose issue with large game size is the amount of space used on their disk, but it would help people whose issue is the long download times.
My guess is Valve doesn't offer a 'decompress your ogg files to wav at install time' feature though.
Even when you do want lossless assets, as long as you compress in reasonable chunks there is no downside.
For me, the net result is that Titanfall was one of the first games to go when I needed space. Low hanging fruit.
Even if it was deliberate, I have to question the logic and wonder how much usage they enabled vs. uninstalls from file size over time.
I was thinking about buying Mass Effect yesterday, the recent update, but it requires 150GB and I don't have a Windows partition that big! (I'm Dual booting Linux) So I think money is being lost in people who aren't often gamers and haven't bought big disks for gaming.
They may have some of my money, but not much (discount!), and they’re not getting money for DLCs, arguably the reason the base game was so cheap, and I’m not in a rush to buy more stuff that I can’t fit on my PC.
Prior to the era of the initial game purchase being just the entry point I’d have agreed with you, but many modern games have monetization strategies that make uninstallation a problem.
And if they have a strong enough incentive to care about CPU usage, they’re clearly putting effort into optimizing for some audience.