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Yeh you can watch at lower volume with subtitles because even if you don't conciously look at them it still helps your brain interpret the sounds and make up for anything you miss due to the reduced volume.

Maybe if Gen X had ever learned to level audio correctly with limited spectrum and inverse dynamics we could understand what people were saying between explosions.

I've used descriptive audio to re-"watch" my favorite movies while driving for work. It's fascinating how the descriptions work with the time constraints to get the story across.

Here's a great podcast episode about how they are made: 20,000 Hertz - Audio Descriptions

The sound is often so fucked up. Music, explosions, guns, cars etc are so fucking loud, but conversations are very dim, as if people are almost whispering. It's often very hard to hear what people are saying, especially when eating crisps.

I always use English subs, even when watching stuff in my own language (Dutch)

1. There was this complete and utter hack with a couple fluke hits under his belt named George Lucas. He noticed that some theaters might not even have functioning audio sometimes, so he hired some engineers to create THX.
2. Movie theater audio systems continued to go big blue baby boinking bonkers. Remember when the THX logo wasn't survivable by children under 7?
3. Directors, especially the self-important "my vision must be realized" scrotes, the ones who objected to a playback speed setting on Netflix, start designing their soundtracks to take full advantage of 90.1 channel 1.21 jiggawatt sound systems as found at the local umptyplex. They can make the sound of a dental drill sound like it's in your mouth.
4. While all of that was going on, TV technology changed significantly. We went from big boxes with CRTs and thus plenty of room for speaker cones inside, to a 2 inch thick LCD panel with down/back firing laptop speakers. Or people consume video content on laptops, tablets or phones instead of a "television."
5. Even with the increased popularity/necessity of external soundbars and surround sound systems, a home 5.1 system still can't keep up with Dolby THX Atmos Skibidi Brushless Guarana Turbo Surround.
6. Movie theaters have been closing down in droves.
7. Television" the art form has converged a lot with movies. Since the 90's there's been a trend of making television shows more "cinematic," wider aspect ratios, more dramatic lighting, more dynamic camera angles, longer episodes, overall plots that you need to watch in order. So television shows fall into the same engineering traps that movies do. Mix it for the theater, even though half of your audience is going to watch this on an iPhone 12.
8. "movies" and "tv" are now mostly consumed on devices with poor quality stereo speakers, and yet the audio was designed for million dollar cinema systems, so the dialog is completely unintelligible.
9. "Survey reveals most people under 40 use subtitles."

I turn on subtitles to subtley force my kid to read. He's got ADHD like me, but mine made me read at a super early age, while he struggles with it. To me, it's a way to expose him to words and the spelling as they come. My dad struggled with reading as well and basically just memorized most words and their pronunciation instead of actually learning to read. If that helps the kiddo, then I don't mind it, but I secretly turn it off by myself, and turn it back on when I'm done.

Audio levels are mixed horribly and go crazy loud with music but i cant fucking hear anyone talking. It feels like around 2010 or something tv shows and movies were like "lets just forget about voices and let everyone hear explosions and shitty driving music".

Its not my ears because YouTube folks who can mix their audio properly are easy to hear. Anime is mixed well usually with voices.

Its the studios doing this for whatever reason unknown to us.

I use subtitles 100% of the time now.

For fucks sake, can we just get releases that have separate audio tracks for dialogue, music, and effects that we the viewer can decide how we want to hear it?

Video games figured this out

I don't want the explosions to be so loud that it wakes my entire house.

I have hearing loss, and from this thread I gather most of you have it too lol. Yeah, probably sound mixing is bad, but do yourself a favor and get checked. Your life quality can really improve if you treat this condition.

It helps with the dialogue, but I also like it because I feel like it keeps my mind more active and involved in the story. It’s more like reading a book and watching a movie.

We use subtitles because the sound mixing is fucking terrible in most media now. It's set up for massive theatres where dialogue sounds normal and gunfire or explosions sounds realistically loud. But I'm not trying to have realistically loud explosions in my living room on my Vizio, so the volume is set accordingly, meaning you can't make out words half the time.

that is also the dryest popcorn I have ever seen, where is the butter?

Because they insist on mixing the audio in a shitty way so unless you want to fiddle with the audio-level every 5 seconds or have your eardrums shattered by action/suspense-scenes, you can't hear dialogue and need subs to understand what the fuck is going on...

Edit: and before people start saying "5.1 in stereo is the cause!1!!1!1", no forcing stereo does absolutely nothing to alleviate this.