I've traveled around a lot in the past couple years so my situation (read: homelab equipment) has been changing and my usecase has been changing with it. It started out as:

- I dont want to unplug the GPU from my gaming PC and plug it into my linux server

- Then: I dont want to figure out PCI forwarding, I'll just open a port and nfs to the containers/vms (ffmpeg-over-ip v4 needed shared filesystem)

- Now: I have a homelab of 4 mini PCs and one of them has an RTX 3090 over Oculink. I need it for local LLMs but also video encoding and I dont want to do both on the same machine.

But you've asked a more fundamental question, why would people need hardware accelerated video decoding in the first place? I need it because my TV doesn't support all the codecs and I still want to watch my movies at 4K without stuttering.

You can transcode in realtime in software to your TV. You don't need the GPU at all. Even on ancient USFF PCs.