The crazy licensing situation is only relevant to nerds, pretty much any chip you care about has hardware h265 decode.

You probably used the wrong settings. Netflix said "AV1 streaming sessions achieve VMAF scores that are 4.3 points higher than AVC and 0.9 points higher than HEVC sessions" 9 months ago: https://netflixtechblog.com/av1-now-powering-30-of-netflix-s...