Comment by acdha

VP8 was never competitive with H.264 – like WebP the apparent savings was due to lowering detail by double-encoding. Since people care about battery life / fan noise it only made sense if you were running a huge operation with the infrastructure to encode variants for niche combinations as well as the mainstream devices.

VP9 could beat H.264 but not H.265 or AV1, and there was only a brief window where it had hardware acceleration ahead of better codecs.