In your experience, how does VC-2 compare to JPEG XS from a quality perspective? The JPEG XS resources I’ve seen say JPEG XS has higher visual quality, but curious what it’s like in practice.

JPEG-XS is an almost direct successor to VC-2. They use the same techniques and if you read JPEG-XS's whitepaper they explicitly cite VC-2 as an inspiration and a target to surpass. JPEG-XS is an improvement, there is not doubt about that, but unfortunately they decided to patent it for all uses. In both cases, the publicly available software implementations are very few, CPU-based, and the ones that aren't are implemented in hardware inside business AV solutions.