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You can force AV1 through YT settings. https://www.youtube.com/account_playback

Could AV1 be more costly to decode, even in hardware, compared to VP9?

There is no web standard to list what codecs are hardware accelerated—good for fingerprinting resistance, bad for battery.

Browsers can just limit the codecs they claim to support to those that the system supports in hardware.

I believe that's what Safari did for a while with VP8 or VP9 – it was only available while plugged in on my old Mac if I remember correctly. There was a developer option called "support VP9 even on battery power" or something similar.