No. What it can affect though is the bandwidth of the cable, meaning e.g. for HDMI cables, they might not support higher resolutions or framerates. If it's on the border you might see random disconnects or screen blanks.

The quality degrading is not something you will see, as it's a digital protocol.

"Audiophile grade" HDMI cables are likely to just be a Shenzhen bargain-bin special with some fancy looking sheathing and connectors. I would trust them less than an Amazon Basics cable.

With digital signals and ECC, the cable need only be "good enough" to get perfect data transfer through the system.

No. What I am saying is that it is hard to test the quality of a 8K 240Hz 4444 video cable without having a device that can send and receive this or even higher.

If you send bits across a line fast enough you're grtting into the territory of RF electronics, with wrong connector or conductor geometry you will get echos on the line and all kind of signal loss. A good digital protocol should keep this at bay with error correction and similar mechanisms, but if you want to know what the good cable is on a better than binary scale of works/does not, you need to look at these things.