That’s exactly the issue: “Participants in that discussion expressed concerns about getting users to adopt WebP by default if it is moved to its own plugin.”

I, and certainly many other users I know of, do NOT want WebP images!
I always felt like this was pushed down our throats by Google interests, the company that developed this format and keeps nagging about it in its “search console”. As stated before, I gave WebP a try and didn’t achieve much except a doubling of my database with all the associated problems. My mobile speed score is in the mid 90s without this bs feature.