The red route makes sense, because you’re connecting two of the most populous coastal areas of the US to each other.

If you compare this fictional map to an existing map of freight rail there are a lot of similarities

It’s not “people” who are causing the proliferation of formats like webp though, it’s the web industry.

If you are a web platform, you want a format that gives you acceptable quality for the smallest size to reduce your bandwidth. You also want one that loads as fast as possible from a CPU prospective, so your site renders as fast as possible.

These are factors webp was designed for.

To your point, for home users jpeg remains a good-enough choice with no reason to change it. A preferred choice even, due to broad legacy compatibility. But we aren’t seeing proliferation of webp because people are at home willingly going “file -> export as -> webp” - no, we’re seeing it because industry is converting uploads to it, and people are saving those images.

Genuine question - what aspect of it didn’t work for them?

That’s the thing - we just can’t know. Sometimes a feature is just a feature, but with commercial software there’s always more risk it’s going to change under you for the wrong reasons when they find some way to monetise it.

Except it will, because developers aren’t going to bother maintaining an app where the install base is just pixel users with Graphene