"1.3. Defensive Termination. If any Licensee, its Affiliates, or its agents initiates patent litigation or files, maintains, or voluntarily participates in a lawsuit against another entity or any person asserting that any Implementation infringes Necessary Claims, any patent licenses granted under this License directly to the Licensee are immediately terminated as of the date of the initiation of action unless 1) that suit was in response to a corresponding suit regarding an Implementation first brought against an initiating entity, or 2) that suit was brought to enforce the terms of this License (including intervention in a third-party action by a Licensee)."
This makes it much harder for practicing entities or their licensees to assert claims against other practicing entities over the formats.
Ultimately, it's a question of how much you're gonna risk to get where you want, and how much power/influence/wealth you can bring to squash a possible lawsuit.
To completely avoid risk your only choice is to to use old technology where all the patents have expired (20 years in US), like MPEG-2. The next lowest risk is to use H.264 and VP9 which have been out for a while and whose the patent pools have stabilized over the years (and the original parts of the standard will have their patents expire soon - but not some of the newer profiles). After that I would argue that AV1 is less risky that H.265 and H.266, as a lot of work was put into intentionally avoiding patented technology that was not part of the pool, and no one outside the pool has yet made patent claims against it.
EVC baseline is basically that, only using technology based on H.264 that are already expired or soon to be expired and patented techniques from companies that are giving it away to the standard.
In some way EVC is even more exciting than VVC.