They explicitly said they were disabling it because nobody cares and no industry players were behind in. Not some kind of conspiracy, an actual objective evaluation. With Apple behind it, perhaps the activation energy will exist.
This is absolutely ridiculous take given JPEG XL is mainly authored by Google and Cloudinary, with AVIF coming from Netflix & alliance that includes Google.
There is no "competitor" here. Just a format nobody else indicated interest in supporting (notably Apple which forces ~half of mobile marked to have no support, given their browser engine restrictions).
Now that they added the support Chrome can easily bring it back.
2. There has never been another image format that has the level of support or interest as JEPG XL since JPEG becomes the internet standard. And that was before the drama of Chrome dropping support for it.
And web browsers aren't the industry. Adobe added support for it, for example, and it didn't really seem like Google did a good-faith discussion with actual industry players, who range from content creation software to OS makers to other web browsers.
It's also not like there are people lining up to use AVIF right now and Google is still pushing for it.