My thoughts on this are that we should remember this is only relevant for streaming. For a lot of our music we’re mastering for club playout primarily, and may not even have it on streaming sites. In that case there’s no use in worrying what the loudness standard for streaming sites is. It’s still good information though and you’re correct. I’d say it’s more important to know what you’re targeting when you’re deciding what your benchmark is. If it’s to stand up to a club set, reference tracks from labels that play the type of shit you wanna hear your songs in a set with.
Also, it is true that streaming services have their LUFS levels they will decrease your track to if it is higher than their standard. I also know from first hand verification that professionally engineered music from large artists is being uploaded to streaming services/iTunes at levels that are outside their “recommended” loudness and presumably taking the volume hit. So I don’t know if the best advice is to just set it to what the streaming sites say they want and be done with it. As I say good to know that its happening though