The newer “more environmentally friendly” ™ refrigerants are highly compressed unlike R22 which causes many more leaks and the latest stuff is highly flammable. Talk about reinventing the wheel and creating problems where there were none.
I wonder how much refrigerants lost to leaks in the system, either from newer ones running at much higher pressure, or just other issues compared to tweakers stealing copper from the systems.
My friend did mostly small commercial work, like restaurants, however, his company also did places like supermarkets. They had one call assisted where Tweaker stole copper and dump like 700+ pounds of refrigerant to atmosphere.