That is what I have been saying for close to 10 years now. We are quite close to Patents free H.264 High Profile.

You will always have to provide H.264 as baseline due to compatibility. And that has a cost of storage. Bandwidth cost have been declining fast, and with AI Capex it doesn't seems to be slowing down either. Meanwhile Storage cost hasn't drop, if anything recent trend suggest it may have plateau and went up for HDD.

H.264 1080P 2Mbps is good enough for a lot of things. Just like how MPEG-2 is still getting encoder improvement ~30 years later so is H.264 encoder.

There are other codec like LCEVC which you can apply on top of H.264 can provide up to 60% bitrate reduction for 4K content. This saves on storage cost and provide enough benefits.

It is only in streaming services like Netflix where the catalog of video are low enough they could afford to re-encode it every 5- 8 months and storage cost is minimal.

Again a new codec introduction is easily a 10 years task. Higher Speed PON is already being tested, while others are working on NGS-PON2 roll out. 5G Home Broadband with Massive MIMO. The true free and open Video Codec may not be AV1 or AV2, but H.264.