I'd caution not to lump all fans together as a single group. The internet in general (or perhaps more accurately the world as a whole) has plenty of absolutely awful people with seemingly nothing better to do than pointlessly harass others.

Anime fans can be a bit ridiculous but at the same time some of them accomplish impressive things. They've pushed AV1 (and other) encoders forward substantially. A number of older shows that were never going to get a remaster have been made much more pleasant to watch thanks to downright obsessive restoration efforts. They've also salvaged at least a few horrendous remasters that would otherwise have never been fixed.

Amusingly they're responsible for the propagation of the leaked DCP versions of several titles despite the fact that even most fairly high end devices aren't capable of playing such videos back due to the hardware being insufficient.

I still find it hilarious that of all things people pirating cartoons in their free time ended up driving a significant amount of codec tooling development. I wonder how you'd calculate the broader net economic impact of such an outcome.

I didn't say fans, I said fans. Fans are people that make baseless claims online thinking they are smarter than everyone else while accomplishing nothing worthwhile. Fans have brought us things like AVISynth and the plugins available for it. Only a fanatic would suffer with VfW like that. There's also aegisub, ASS files, and many other tools. We'll just ignore the prolific pirating and a now major anime streaming platform that started off of using fan subs.

> They've pushed AV1 (and other) encoders forward substantially.

AFAIK fansubbers were the first to adopt 10-bit video, way back in 2011.