This right here is the main reason. Pirate groups continued to do xvid encodes for many years after h264 was unquestionably superior for the exact same reason.

This right here is the main reason. Pirate groups continued to do xvid encodes for many years after h264 was unquestionably superior for the exact same reason. The big picture here is that we've hit the point of diminishing returns with video codecs. Up until h264, with lots of work you could improve codecs to get significant gains in compression with very little increase in complexity. That's pretty much done though. If we had to keep using h264 for videos for the rest of eternity it wouldn't be all that bad. Sure, eventually we'll want something a bit better most of the time, but when it's a choice between a 16 GB h264 encode and a 8 GB AV1 encode that takes 10x the CPU time to encode and decode, it's not unreasonable to think we might choose the former for many applications.