Have you tried Molly FOSS, or are you using the standard one with proprietary dependencies? Is there a meaningful difference in day to day functionality?
If you look into it a bit more, the resistance around WebP is mainly because it has some crippling weaknesses. I did some visual quality testing ( here, here & here ) & I (as well as many others independently) have found that for photographic images, WebP & JPEG are equals, & Google's messaging that lossy WebP meaningfully improves upon JPEG for general visual quality per bit is misleading. That being said, WebP has some important strengths that are not often acknowledged. In addition to transparency & (really good) animation support, it also has:
a lossless mode that often outperforms PNG
great nonphotographic compression (though AVIF outperforms it here)
decent compression of photographic sources at lower fidelity, where it actually starts to beat JPEG by a good amount
Totally royalty free
WebP's main weaknesses are:
not better than JPEG for photographic images at useful fidelity
Confusing messaging from Google, may have led to slow adoption
Based on a video codec, so no progressive decode (even JPEG has this)
limited to 8 BPC (lossy & lossless)
superseded by JPEG-XL & AVIF, which are both pretty much better at everything
JPEG-XL in particular is very promising. It faces hostility from Google but has an incredible breadth of features & strong compression performance, as well as Apple ecosystem-wide adoption on the way with the upcoming versions of macOS, iOS, ipadOS, etc. It is also royalty free. AVIF is better than WebP at everything except lossless, too.
Feeling any which way about WebP, it is still a shame to see it transcoded to PNG. All that wasted potential ...
JPEG has always been royalty-free. It just supported arithmetic coding, which at the time was patented. Arithmetic coded JPEGs are exceedingly rare & you're unlikely to run into any on the Web.
My Framework Laptop experience was really poor. Battery life was impossibly bad, Linux support was not as stellar as promised, the thing had the loudest fan I've ever heard, & my entire mainboard died & it took support 2 weeks to diagnose the issue. I'd go System76. I went with a Mac for Apple Silicon, & I'm going to try Asahi Linux soon
I have MicroG