You’re right about the bitrates producing similar sizes but “blurry mess” seems like pure hyperbole, especially in the context of replacing GIFs rather than say a theater setup (or we should count AV1s difficulty playing in real-time on all but the latest hardware against it).
I was thinking of the comparison from this angle:
GIF: plays everywhere, horrible quality and giant file sizes, high CPU usage.
H.264: plays everywhere, good quality and file sizes, almost universal hardware acceleration even on cheap devices
VP9: plays many places, competitive size with H.264, hardware acceleration is common but entire popular platforms lack support
AV1: limited support, great file sizes, hardware support has barely started shipping.
If the goal is to replace GIFs I would weight compatibility and ease of playback much greater than bumping the file size savings from 95% to 97%.
I was thinking of the comparison from this angle:
GIF: plays everywhere, horrible quality and giant file sizes, high CPU usage.
H.264: plays everywhere, good quality and file sizes, almost universal hardware acceleration even on cheap devices
VP9: plays many places, competitive size with H.264, hardware acceleration is common but entire popular platforms lack support
AV1: limited support, great file sizes, hardware support has barely started shipping.
If the goal is to replace GIFs I would weight compatibility and ease of playback much greater than bumping the file size savings from 95% to 97%.