The switch from MPEG-2 to H.264 had that in droves with the cable companies updating their set top boxes. That was enough demand to drive hardware development. I don't know how many people have cut the cord as I haven't played in that field to see numbers in quite some time. I'm guessing there won't be a big push to switch out boxes to support AV2. Even shiny round disc sales are plummeting to the point there's not really a need for an at home player to use it either. This really feels like something for streaming only. Those can all be software decoders. Hopefully, they can make it work well on efficiency cores and not require GPU cores for decode. As you say, vast majority of people won't need to encode so sure make a GPU encoder

Yes, I stipulate your point, but people are not looking for better encodes at the same bit rate. They are only looking for not worse quality at much lower bit rate. One project I was working on had a hard file size limitation, and switching to h.265 was able to get the size under the limit. At one point, I was told to make it smaller by X MBs. The image wasn't even being looked at with each change. This is why I make the distinction the way that I did.