I'm partly speaking out of my ass from second-hand experience 10 years ago but... Wavelet-based codecs turned out to be much harder to implement in hardware th

I'm partly speaking out of my ass from second-hand experience 10 years ago but... Wavelet-based codecs turned out to be much harder to implement in hardware that fourier-transform-based ones (for which we have FFT!). That disincentivized development, which is why you only have Dirac (an open-source, non-HW-industry-backed effort) that uses it.