The Chromium issue where they made this decision is full of "hardware and software vendors" (Adobe, Serif/Affinity, Krita, Facebook, Shopify, Cloudinary, Intel, Nvidia, the VESA DisplayHDR Chairman) telling them they're making a terrible decision and is one of the most-starred and most-commented-on issues of all time for Chromium.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=117805...
"and the commit to remove support was created by a co-author of WebP who gives talks on WebP and is the primary contributor to libwebp."
Google also employs two of the co-authors of JPEG XL, who give talks on JPEG XL, and was were two of the primary contributors to libjxl.
The main authors of the JPEG XL specification are Jyrki Alakuijala, Jon Sneyers, and Luca Versari. Jyrki is a Googler. Jon is at Cloudinary. Luca is also at Google.
If you are going to try to come up with a silly conspiracy about this being WebP related, it probably would help if this wasn't the case.
Maybe consider that they do in fact have the expertise necessary to decide whether JPEG-XL is something they want to do?
I mean, seriously. You can disagree with the decision, but your argument that they have no idea what they are doing WRT to JPEG-XL seems pretty silly - the only company who arguably has any better idea would be cloudinary.
It's not the expertise of your employer that is in question but the morals.
Which is completely nonsensical. Hardware support is meaningless for web images.
