Could it be a lack of resources? Or some missing expertise? Maybe they could find some interns who are familiar with it? Maybe the entire world is so obsessed w AI, we don't even care about image formats anymore.
Honestly this kind of stuff happens all the time in large companies.
Interns won't want to work on a dead end like this. Moreso they need to be supervised by someone that doesn't want to get removed by being the lowest X% usefulness in a company. So all these existing tools that aren't primary revenue generators just sit on coast mode.
If you are using an image optimization service like Imgix / Cloudflare Image Resizing then it doesn't really matter, image can be uploaded as any supported format and will be sent to the end user according to their "Accept" header
Sure, ur then it’s my image viewer, my phones image viewer, the website I try and upload pictures to. This isn’t a problem you can solve by patching one application, and it’s not one the world as a whole cares about.
Better image formats serve entities who store images at scale, not end users.
Edit: and good luck uploading the format to the majority of webforms that aren’t faang.