> Free codecs only came along at all because Google decided to subsidize development but that became possible only 15 years or so after MPEG was born

The release of VP3 as open source predates Google's later acquisition of On2 (2010) by nearly a decade.

In practice nobody outside a handful of developers and executives at rich tech firms seems to care about video codec licensing - open codecs were barely used anywhere until they matched the quality of the MPEG standards. They still aren't that widely used. H.264 is supposedly 90%+ of all digital video even now (well, as of a few years ago at least according to Google).