It could get us out of this mess after a decade of it's hardware encoder/decoder being built into things. If we all just switched to it now, if everything shipped with hardware encoder for AV1 now magically, it would still be a decade before the pre-existing computers/devices were no longer used and AV1 could actually be a default. That's only become possible with HEVC recently.

I do look forwards to an open future. But it's no quick solution.