Sure, but this was my point, x264 is very fast on commodity hardware, the overwhelming amount of video delivered is still h.264, especially on live video, and in particular for low-viewership, live user generated content.

If you want/need to transcode to VP9 or AV1 at scale with good quality, yes, you'll absolutely need GPU or ASIC accelerated encoders, of which there are a couple for VP9, and none for AV1 today.

h.264 will get you to 95-99% market penetration on the device landscape.