As simplistic as it may sound but Google probably removed it mostly because it's a chunk of c++ that they don't want around. I'm the last person to usually endorse a rewrite but in this case maybe they should consider a Rust port so browsers feel more comfortable including this. The point of an image format is to be adopted by everyone.. it's kind of beneficial if you make that usecase as attractive as possible. Personally I think Rust is actually hard to understand and for that reason dangerous too. But it definitely has some safety over c++.