This isn't a good article because of how biased it is against Google. It ignores that there is added cost to Google and their partners in supporting it and ignores the recommendation to use a WASM decoder.
Lack of popularity hasn’t stop them from supporting webp and AVIF.
This is a bad argument because with that money they can also afford to do almost anything. They could also add any random file format to the browser, but that increases costs to support the web for more than just Google. Meanwhile adding a polyfill to support the format is performant without adding complexity to the web.