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I’ve been reading through all the conversation and issues here. I am interested in supporting new formats and improving performance, but I think this change being pushed by default to users when they upgrade to 6.1 is a lot for right now, including with some of the clunky interactions OSes still have around webp (and HEIC!) files.
I’m happy for support for working for webp and HEIC files to stay in core, as we should be liberal in what we accept and work with, but not with the change to convert everything to webp when JPEGs are uploaded.
This is excellent territory for a canonical plugin, a concept I think every Make team should be exploring a lot more as a place to experiment and push functionality, much like we have with MP6 and Gutenberg in the past. I think the plugin directory needs more collaborative, community-developed, and non-commercial or no-upgrade plugins that do something well, and make teams are the perfect groups to develop and maintain those. It’s the ethos and process of core applied to plugins, that then we can officially recommend and feature in the plugin directory, and also allows us to keep core light or give more time for the ecosystem around something (like WebP) to mature.