Most devices DO support H.264 encoding. Hangouts however uses VP9 in Chrome and that's not HW accelerated. If you use Safari on Mac it'll switch to H264 and that will stress CPU less.
I've tried to run 4K60 VP9 (and h.265 for that matter) video from youtube on the latest top spec MacBook Pro and it's completely impossible to watch. Transcoded to h.264 and computer barely gets warm.
It would definitely be an interesting way to look at how bad software patents are for our society. It's not Google's fault (though they do participate in this system) that good technology had been locked away only to be used by proprietary software.
But also I think you're missing the point of free software if you want to limit usage of free software based on your personal value judgement of a company. That's antithetical to free software.