You must not have a very long memory. The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) published a call for proposals for what would become JPEG-XL in 2018. That's not so long ago.
Are you sure you're not thinking about JPEG-2000?
Maybe JPEG earned that with pushing a deliberately patent infested codec with horrible proprietary implementations? And at the time when the god damn GIF patents were causing grief, and h.264 trolls were on the rise.
This is not a rhetorical question, I was way too young back then to have been aware of the conversations which were going on regarding JPEG-2000. I see that PNG was developed specifically to be unencumbered, which suggests that at least some groups were focused on it, to your point. But I can't tell if that was a mainstream concern at the time like it is now.