Yes, most are. That Core 2 Duo machine is the weakest hardware I have that I know can decode H.264 lower bitrate FullHD content in software. It made for a good benchmarking baseline.
H265 or VP9 in software are the same… Here, we managed to have a sw decoder for a format that is one order of magnitude more complex than those codecs and yet, consume less CPU.
No. I understand your vitriol, but please just stop. I'm not demeriting AV1's technical basis.