My point is simply that the filter manufacturers that sold people on high efficiency (while not always being high efficiency) ended up having tears and bypasses.
Many of those filters, in fact the majority, that had tears, were the Motorcraft filters produced by Purolator for Ford; these were OE filters. The "bypass" problem, at least with the cans, has been a Worst Brands problem, and started when designs were consolidated and Champ Labs design decisions began showing up in FRAM products, exasperated by QC issues (ruffles).
The high efficiency filtration push didn't come from the passenger car and light truck market, it's a trickle-down from the heavy truck and equipment market lead by Donaldson and Fleetguard, these companies pioneered multi-layer synthetic media filtration for applications with lifespans far longer than Joe Blow and his TGMO + OE filter ring stick special are expected to be on the road.
You are quite right, that for the manufacturer's anticipated lifespan of the vehicle, one doesn't need high levels of filtration to get there, just like the oil with the lowest wear isn't needed, nor are the ring lands required to be kept clean and free of deposits. Everything is a compromise. German OEM's use plastic that fails for overflow tanks, hoses that biodegrade for evap, and choose gaskets to be made out of butyl rubber, which becomes rock hard and leaks. These are all intentional choices with known lifespans for these components.
Cummins, one of the world's largest diesel engine manufacturers, spent considerable effort developing superior filtration media for lube and hydraulic applications. The goal was to allow for extended intervals while reducing wear. Donaldson did the same thing with their Synteq media, which found a home, particularly their air filters, as the OE choice for a variety of diesel manufacturers. GM even used their PowerCore filters on the Duramax. This isn't an effort forged in the loins of the advertising arm of some consumer swindler trying to separate Joe Average from his money, but a data-driven engineering exercise undertaken in a market where an engine can cost several times more than a car and downtime can cost millions of dollars an hour.
Donaldson and Fleetguard took this down-market in limited offerings for common cans (both made a synthetic media FL-1A for example, Fleetguard makes an FL-820S equivalent). FRAM was the first aftermarket company to make a real effort to extend this concept to the light truck and passenger car space with the XG series about 20 years ago. This was rebranded as the "Ultra"
around 2012. There was originally no cartridge version of this filter made. They employed the same approach as Fleetguard, using multiple layers of depth filtration media of different efficiencies to create a filter element that had high efficiency, better flow and greatly increased capacity. AMSOIL hooked-up with Donaldson and WIX and had their EaO series developed where WIX cans were used in applications that a Donaldson cross didn't exist. The target market in both cases was extended drain applications, similar to the approach taken with HD equipment by Fleetguard and Donaldson.
Purolator marketed a high efficiency filter (PureONE, later the Purolator ONE) with conventional (synblend) media. This is not in the same ballpark. Their offering slate was extended when they were bought by the German filter manufacturer Mann-Hummel, the hope at the time was that we would see a reduction in QC issues (they had pleat spacing and tearing problems) but that didn't happen.
Both WIX and Purolator (under Mann-Hummel) introduced synthetic media filters that were markedly worse than the Ultra. I think one could reasonably argue your point here about these being more of a marketing exercise than a purpose-developed product. Champion Labs produced a synthetic media filter for Royal Purple and AMSOIL eventually moved to the same offering and away from what I assume was a more expensive to produce EaO from Donaldson+WIX.
Then First Brands bought FRAM and Champion Labs and the wheels quickly came off the trolly. The Ultra was "redesigned" (cheapened) and the painstakingly developed and tested multi-layer synthetic media was discarded, replaced by a synblend (like the Purolator ONE), dusted with a synthetic "topper". Of course claims of efficiency being "even better!" were made. Then they took the Royal Purple/AMSOIL EaO, put it in a FRAM can and called it "Synthetic Endurance", while QC continued to decline. One of the main issues with this design was the lack of seal between the metal bottom of the can and the leaf spring/bypass combo, which was just metal-on-metal, while it was a gasketed assembly in the XG/Ultra. The leak-prone nature of this interface was exasperated by the ruffles that began to appear in the leaf spring as Worst Brands drove their filter division off a cliff.
So no, high efficiency filtration isn't some marketing intern's wet dream, peddled only in America because Americans are disproportionately vulnerable to predatory advertising practices. It's a data-driven engineering exercise that was primarily undertaken by an engine manufacturer wanting to extend the life and service intervals of their equipment, as well as a heavy duty filter manufacturer independently developing superior filtration solutions for OEM's in the same segment. Initial efforts to take this down-market focused on a high quality product with considerable engineering and testing done (FRAM XG). That the success of this endeavor was observed and Temu'd by competitors, ultimately delivering something "less"? This is irrelevant to the underlying science that created this space and continues to deliver advancements in the original market.
