Also the fact that hardware-accelerated AAC and even full AAC offload is ubiquitous in modern-ish hardware. I think my rice cooker can play AAC audio

No one really offloads AAC, apart from Apple. Opus can be decoded on very cheap microcontrollers entirely in software using the reference library.

	▲	philistine 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		On a microcontroller doing nothing else sure. But on a phone, a tablet, a laptop, you absolutely want hardware decode to preserve your battery life.