By that logic, wouldn't essentially every edited video (i.e. on YouTube etc) look "severely degraded", since it's always re-encoded after editing? I've read many places (including here on SO) where people discuss recompressing h264 to h265 with minimal or no perceptual loss (in mathematical terms, lots of loss of course - but in terms of what the viewer can actually perceive, virtually none). I'm a bit surprised to hear the perspective that effectively it would be impossible to use h265 without a "SEVERELY degraded" result...

I'm not really sure how to interpret that as it pertains to my question - do you mean that regardless of what options I choose, transcoding from h264 to h265 will always yield poor results...? (i.e. "this would not sound very good" -> "it would not look very good")...?