Is there any chance that this is part of a good-faith attempt to apply pressure to the patent pool consortium*? They are presumably now missing out on a substantial license fee revenue stream, and may wish to regain Dell and HP as licensees by lowering the price? There must be some thread of rationality over at patent pool HQ that knows this is just going to hyper-accelerate the migration away from HEVC to other codecs, as well as make VVC completely toxic?

* Not sure if consortium is the right word. Racket maybe?