Minor correction: they started with VP8 and a PR campaign trying to spin it as better than H.264 but it took VP9 to actually deliver better results than H.264. Both VP9 and H.265 offer big improvements but with a corresponding jump in processor requirements.

And, yes, it was not Google's finest hour, especially when they strung Mozilla promising to disable H.264 in Chrome but never actually shipping it (remember https://brendaneich.com/2012/03/video-mobile-and-the-open-we...).