There is an interesting cult I only realized after this affair, namely a group of WebP haters. Apparently there are a lot of them but weren't visible until JPEG XL is seen as a "solution" to WebP, and many of them became a vocal supporter for JPEG XL at any cost. So that's a big part of the cult.
Another part is probably a growing opposition to Google and Chrome. I had to explain again and again that JPEG XL was also jointly developed by Google (Research Zurich) and Cloudinary, but you can still reasonably argue that Chrome aligns better with Google's own interest than Google Research. And if you apply the same stringent criteria to AVIF, AVIF doesn't stand well either---it would have made zero positive difference if AVIF was deployed this year and not 2 years ago, and libavif is not that small. As AVIF and JPEG XL have their pros and cons when compared to each other, this alone can be seen suspicious enough from outsiders. Keep in mind that Chrome is now the Web Browser so there are a lot more to expect from them, like or not.
I'm probably part of the group you'd call "WebP haters", especially if you look at my comment history[1]. I would rather describe myself as extremely disappointed in WebP.
It's a clear win over PNG in the lossless use case. I have encountered a few outliers where a PNG results in a smaller file size than lossless WebP, but they are sufficiently rare to not worry about it. It also excludes the image sizes too large for WebP to handle (my system has a mix of WebP-lossless and PNG files for that reason). For lossy use cases, however, WebP is not a win over JPEG if you are concerned about anything other than file size. MozJPEG closes the encoding size gap rather significantly and WebP-lossy's origins in VP8 intraframes and limiting itself to 4:2:0 subsampling is just... awful. I never use WebP-lossy. It gains nothing from JPEG and comes out as inferior in basically all scenarios.
I don't view JPEG XL as a "solution" to WebP, but rather as a solution to JPEG. WebP was never competitive in the first place.
You have a right to be disappointed, I was the same and that alone doesn't make you a part of the cult. ;-)
I agree that WebP was initially oversold and better JPEG encoders have made lossy WebP increasingly less appealing; a lossless WebP is still worth today though.
I dont even believe it was oversold. There were lots of independent reviews and analysis, even by Mozilla themselves that WebP wasn't even good. And yet people still uses it because they somehow hate JPEG.
It there was ever a "cult", it is "Anti JPEG cult" and "WebP Cult". Not JPEG XL.
I'm the author of lossless WebP. From my personal point of view I agree, the benefits of WebP lossy were too marginal to balance off its weaknesses (I have observed somewhat unpredictable quality, tendency to blurring, occasional reduction of saturation, and limitation to 420).
I like MozJPEG in the lower quality range, but I'm disappointed with it in the medium-to-high quality range (q85-100) -- there guetzli or jpegli does quite a bit better. Often MozJPEG appears worse than libjpeg-turbo in the highest quality whereas both guetzli and jpegli are substantially (~35 %) better.
Another part is probably a growing opposition to Google and Chrome. I had to explain again and again that JPEG XL was also jointly developed by Google (Research Zurich) and Cloudinary, but you can still reasonably argue that Chrome aligns better with Google's own interest than Google Research. And if you apply the same stringent criteria to AVIF, AVIF doesn't stand well either---it would have made zero positive difference if AVIF was deployed this year and not 2 years ago, and libavif is not that small. As AVIF and JPEG XL have their pros and cons when compared to each other, this alone can be seen suspicious enough from outsiders. Keep in mind that Chrome is now the Web Browser so there are a lot more to expect from them, like or not.
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