I think they must be noticing the issues, because I've noticed they've been dropping the stream quality quite substantially... It's a clever trick, but kind of cheap to do so, because who wants to watch pixelated things?
To be brutally honest if it’s a choice between pixelated and constantly buffering, pixelated is way less bad. Constantly buffering is incredibly annoying during live sports. (but this doesn’t negate your main point which is that if people paid to watch they expect decent resolution)