It is literally the same people. I designed WebP lossless and had a lead role in Pik and JPEG XL (invented and implemented gaborish, xyb colorspace, adaptive quantization and block splitting heuristics, modulating epf with adaptive quantization, etc.)

I was confusing JPEG XL with JPEG XR. If google want to kill JPEG XL, this is fine. Since no one is using it I beleive.