Belly full of supermarket salads, a gallon of tea, and soy of the rings on. Living the life these days.

There’s diminishing returns beyond $1000-$2000 IMO, but if you want proper HDR playback you need to pony up for a panel with high enough sustained brightness (not just 2% of the APL window), good contrast (self emissive displays like OLED, or a proper FALD system with enough backlight zones), whether or not the TV actually support DV instead of HDR10+ nonsense only, and how much of a panel lottery that screen is (VA and OLED screens both have their respective QC issues).

The sub $700 TV’s are hot garbage though. The 55”-65” market is usually decent upper midrange around $1200, and you can get higher end sets for $2000 in that size range. Going to 77”-83” for the larger high end TV’s scales the price exponentially.

You also need to factor in how well the TV handles sub native resolution sources/upscaling. Sony TV’s are phenomenal for their handling of sub 1080p inputs (think cable), OEM’s like TCL and Vizio that have very competitive hardware for their flagship models usually come up short there.

With OLED TV’s becoming so much more common now that they’ve supplanted Samsung and Sony’s flagship range versus the FALD TV’s they’d been selling you need to consider BFI, and how the TV’s firmware addresses that and black crush on OLED.

There’s tangible differences to high end screens, buying the sub $400 Black Friday SKU’s like you described is just throwing money away, which tracks with your MO.