If users don't have hardware accelerated video decoding, it's so bad that it actually hurts the experience. I can't imagine that being worth the space savings.

If users don't have hardware accelerated video decoding, it's so bad that it actually hurts the experience. I can't imagine that being worth the space savings. There doesn't have to be a good reason YouTube does it, it might just be someone wanting to insert their tech, which I'm pretty sure is the reason Meet uses it.