The VP9 encoder also tends to smooth ( clean ) the video rather than working with the noise ( Not a problem for most short internet video ), which even as of today x264 is very very good and possibly the best at.
The point is that you can select the VP9 encoder that makes the most sense for your use case. You can choose from EVE, libvpx, Intel SVT-VP9, Intel Quick Sync, NGCodec, mobile device encoders, etc.
* I'm not sure what the "ffh264" decoder they're talking about is. My understanding is that pretty much everyone is using libx264 for both encoding and decoding. Maybe the latter is more performant?
* Using SSIM to pick "equal quality" files will probably not give very accurate results.
* SVT-VP9 is, if I'm not mistaken, a hardware encoder. One of the issues with these is that they require some significant tradeoffs to get better speed, so they'll have worse quality than a software encoder at the same bitrate. If you go with software you really pay the price when it comes to encoding time.
ffh264 is FFmpeg's decoder. libx264 only does encoding, not decoding.
SVT-VP9 is a software encoder, specially optimized for Intel Xeon Scalable and Intel Xeon D processors.
http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/hevc_2018/
http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/hevc_2018/#...
Their subjective testing methodology:
http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/hevc_2018/p...
https://blogs.gnome.org/rbultje/2015/09/28/vp9-encodingdecod...
You get the same image quality at a lower bitrate and faster decoding.
VP9 encoding is much slower, but Intel's SVT-VP9 encoder is getting over 300 frames per second on the right hardware:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SVT-VP9-...