I’m glad to see this slowing down, and hopefully pivoting. Moving to an “on first use” thumbnail generation is really the fundamental solution to all these problems. Until then, everything related to new image formats will just exacerbate the existing issues.

Many of us have raised objections to the “WebP by Default” plans of the Performance Team… While some objections have been addressed, many others have been flat-out ignored or brushed off.

https://wptavern.com/wordpress-performance-team-puts-controversial-webp-by-default-proposal-on-hold-after-critical-feedbackhttps://wptavern.com/wordpress-performance-team-revises-proposal-for-webp-by-defaulthttps://wptavern.com/webp-by-default-merged-into-core-for-wordpress-6-1

On a near-daily basis, we have to deal with our clients’ sites running out of disk space, or backups failing, because they have too many files on their servers. Adding piles of extra WebP images, generated in the background, completely invisibly to most site owners, is going to make things significantly worse over time. (Having only a filter to opt-out is woefully insufficient; most site owners don’t even know what a filter is!)

And if this does pick up again as proposed, it really needs to be opt-in, not opt-out. A setting in the media library — off by default — would give users control over their sites and allow everyone to move forward.