What if there were a setting whereby the first time you play a video, Plex operates as usual, transcoding to the prescribed quality for the viewer, but in doing so it actually saves the transcoded video as an optimized version. Now, the next time that video is played, the optimized version is automatically selected and the server doesn’t have to transcode anything. There could be a storage size limit, and the auto-transcoded files could be deleted in reverse chronological order if the storage size limit is met.
