AV1 has plenty of good stuff. AOM (the agency that developed AV1) has a patent pool https://www.stout.com/en/insights/article/sj17-the-alliance-... comprising of video hardware/software patents from Netflix, Google, Nvidia, Arm, Intel, Microsoft, Amazon and a bunch of other companies. AV1 has a bunch of patents covering it, but also has a guarantee that you're allowed to use those patents as you see fit (as long as you don't sue AOM members for violating media patents).

AV1 definitely is missing some techniques patented by h264 and h265, but AV2 is coming around now that all the h264 innovations are patent free (and now that there's been another decade of research into new cutting edge techniques for it).