Yes, but it stems from the fact that some phone manufacturers decided to reuse the hardware IP they already had in place for JPEG compression instead of paying

Yes, but it stems from the fact that some phone manufacturers decided to reuse the hardware IP they already had in place for JPEG compression instead of paying for another chip that could do MPEG. It works, but it's not compression. Then for some weird reason it gained traction as a "good quality video codec" (probably because there's no motion vectors, hence the associated artifacts simply can't happen with it).