My experience is that VP9 is often a better choice than HEVC. The article mostly compared x265 to x264 because vp9 was not endorsed by Apple. That is no more the case, and I've found VP9 anime videos to have better quality at similar bitrate.

Recent VPx encoders are also better at multi-threading. For instance with ffmpeg: `-c:v vp9 -row-mt 1 -crf 26`