I think it’s really cool how good the newest video codecs are, but here I am finally able to (only very recently) safely use HEVC and assume that pretty much every end user device has hardware support. It’ll be a while before AV1 reaches that level of adoption and even longer before AV2 does. See you in a few years.

You, as an individual, might be able to use HEVC "safely", hoping that nobody will come after you.

However, during the last few days there have been many news about the owners of the HEVC patents and about the owners of the older H.264 patents making great efforts to extort much more money from the users of HEVC or of H.264.

This has made recently some big vendors of computers to disable the hardware HEVC codecs in the computers that they are selling, instead of paying increased royalties.

At least the H.264 patents have already expired in all countries, except in less than a handful of countries, including USA, so the use of H.264 is safe wherever the patents are no longer valid (but not in USA, where the H.264 patents will remain valid for less than a couple of years).

On the other hand, for HEVC the patents will remain valid for many years, so using it will not be safe even for those who pay royalties, as the royalties may be increased at any time, as shown by the recent history.

Therefore it is wise to avoid HEVC (and its VVC successor) and prefer alternative codecs.

I'm far away from being able to use HEVC on really anything other than my phone. Some patents will have to expire first.