But they still need to decode the proprietary DRM before it can be fed to the hardware decoder... lol

I struggle to follow your point. They still need to do that for any codec, and I would think that the DRM decryption would be using algorithms that might also be hardware accelerated.

I think the point is that if you are not Netflix, you can use AV1 as most of your clients devices support hardware acceleration thanks to the big guys using AV1 themselves.