[ksec]

>instead h264 remains the undisputed king

Yes. And I think there is something more than licensing. x264 managed to push H.264 way beyond what anyone could imagine. It wasn't until 2017/2018 did x265 or in fact any commercial H.265 encoder had clear advantage over x264 at 8 / 10Mbps+ bitrate. For HEVC 4K it was obvious, but 4K content never really took off, and h.264 for 1080P was good enough at those bitrate.

I dont know much about AV2, but VVC is looking very promising. I just hope they dont mess this up.