[vvhn]

The "chilling series of messages" takes you to a link which details how File sharing through iTunes on Windows specifically was affected and that a similar file transfer product on Windows iMazing was able to fix to fix it by simply normalizing before transferring. ( The "bag of bytes" response from Apple asks developers to do exactly that btw )

That begs the question that why iTunes itself ( on Windows ) wasn't able to do the same thing as iMazing ?

Anyway that's moot now - As mentioned earlier in this thread iOS 10.3.3 and iOS 11 are changing behaviour w.r.t. this.