your thought experiment is incorrect on several levels, the most important being that 24bit doesn't mean anything gets louder. digital sound has a ceiling that remains constant. recording (where it's most important) at 24bit enables much quieter sounds to be captured accurately, which makes all the difference on things like reverb tails. not to mention you rendered the entire thought worthless by pointing out that CDs don't even use the full 16bit range, so adding the 96dB doesn't make any sense because it doesn't have a real application. and this is primarily incorrect on the scientific level because the Wiki readings on jet engines, etc. is in dBSPL, while the theoretical dynamic range of 96 or 144 is dBFS – not every dB is the same type of dB, as it's entirely dependent on the reference point (something that makes decibels kind of annoying to work with).
also, people get really obsessed with the fact that the human hearing range tops out at 20kHz when talking about oversampling at 96k or whatever, and the fact is that they're right — that's what we hear fullstop, but that isn't all we experience. every frequency in a recorded signal affects every other frequency; every musical sound has a wide range of harmonics that distinguish them from every other sound; and microphones pick that up. the fact that the article in the OP even talks about subsonic shit clogging a 192kHz recording is proof that the 'shit' up there affects our audible frequency band. the fuck do i want an incomplete image for? i want every crisp detail the drum overheads pick up, which goes way beyond where the anti-aliasing filter sitting at 22.05kHz on CD-quality audio. plus, the point is to get digital 'steps' of information (caused by needing to sample) as accurate as possible to the analog curve that has no digital stepping at all, so the higher the sample rate, the closer it is to the analog source wave. that alone should convince anyone it's worth the bandwidth — the only reason anyone fights for 16/44.1 is due to poor perspective (like a programmer who makes an audio encoder) and being at peace with settling for less because it's been spoonfed to us on a shiny disc since the '80s.