> If you are sending the frames via some protocol over the network, like WebRTC, it will be touching the CPU anyway. Software encoding of 4K h264 is real time on a single thread on 65w, decade old CPUs, with low latency.

This is valid for a single stream, but the equation changes when you're trying to squeeze the highest # of simultaneous streams into the least amount of CapEx possible. Sure, you still have to transfer it to the CPU cache just before you send it over WebRTC/HTTP/whatever, but you unlock a lot of capacity by using all the rest of the silicon as much as you can. Being able to use a budget/midrange GPU instead of a high-end ultra-high-core-count CPU could make a big difference to a business with the right use-case.

That said, TFA doesn't seem to be targeting that kind of high stream density use-case either. I don't think e.g. Frigate NVR users are going to switch to any of the mentioned technologies in this blog post.