Other than Jon at Cloudinary, everyone involved with JXL development, from creation of the standard to the libjxl library, works at Google Research in Zurich. The Chrome team in California has zero authority over them. They've also made a lot of stuff that's in Chrome, like Lossless WebP, Brotli, WOFF, the Highway SIMD library (actually created for libjxl and later spun off).