[web007]

> Storage is cheap, bandwidth is cheap, so who cares?

This is a ridiculous assertion.

They're both cheap in the commercial sense, but neither cheap nor infinite in the UX sense. Time and space matter in the real world.

Google wouldn't have created WebP if there was no tangible, measurable cost benefit to using it over some alternative. Same goes for H.264 or HEVC or AV1, at scale bandwidth and storage are far from cheap. See the article on the FP today about Google's double-digit EXAbyte storage clusters with 50TB/s read volume each as a real-world example, there's nothing cheap about that.