If it has a five year start and we've seen almost zero hardware shipping that is a pretty bad sign.

IIRC AV1 decoding hardware started shipping within a year of the bitstream being finalized. (Encoding took quite a bit longer but that is pretty reasonable)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Video_Coding#Hardwar...

Yeah, that's... sparse uptake. A few smart TV SOCs have it, but aside from Intel it seems that none of the major computer or mobile vendors are bothering. AV2 next it is then!