It might be a standard, but for a long time the licensing costs were exorbitant, and that likely stifled adoption. While licensing costs have come down, the pushback against HEIC’s pricing led to the development of better, royalty-free alternatives—including JPEG XL. Thank god they went with an unencumbered standard this time.

Not really. It was a 2 company colab with a pseudo spec. But their implementation had quirks that weren’t in the spec, and weren’t documented anywhere.

We spend a week building a decoder and kept finding new undocumented bits.

I wouldn’t call it a standard when zero folks outside Apple had access a reliable decoder at launch.

Yes, OP worded this a bit incorrectly. Open source, royalty-free standard would be better.