I used one just yesterday when my skybox file was too large and was taking a couple moments to load, and I compressed it a bit with JXL and presto chango goes more quickly now. Although still imperfect because a slightly larger size PNG loads faster. (Kubuntu in respect to the virtual desktop “cube” interface, 32gb of RAM, 8gb video RAM, neither even halfway filled, source files on NVMes)

feel like we’re going to be waiting for 2-5 years at least…

Nvidia and AMD both have differing APIs for video decoding. The idea in using Vulkan is that not every GPU supports the vendor specific decoding method, but they do all support Vulkan (modern GPUs, anyways). So this way you still get hardware accelerated decoding through a more widely supported means.