No, the main problem with HEVC is that it is not licensed under royalty-free terms. In contrast, almost all commonly used internet formats and protocols are licensed under royalty-free terms so everyone is free to use and implement them without paying a licensing fee. Video has been an anomaly.
Imagine if HTML wasn't licensed under royalty-free terms. Or TCP/IP or HTTP or SMTP or any other internet format or protocol that you (probably) use every day. There's no reason why video needs to be a special case here.
Fortunately, video formats like AV1 (https://aomedia.org/) and audio formats like Opus (https://opus-codec.org/) exist for high quality, royalty-free video and audio coding.
These formats are deployed in the real world right now. YouTube, for example, makes extensive use of both. If you have a browser which supports AV1 (Firefox, Chrome, Edge, but not Safari yet), you can see if a YouTube video is playing back in AV1 by right-clicking on the video and selecting "Stats for Nerds".
Anyone know how I can play AV1 using hardware decoding?
Personally I'd much rather use an open standard, and the fact it's better than HEVC doesn't hurt either.
https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/entertainment/av1-open-...
I prefer having a newer codec with superior quality/size. The only reason you wouldn't use HEVC is if your hardware lacks support, the $0.99 version is for the ability to use the codec in software. It's illegal to use it without licensing, but like most things, hard to enforce. Mostly for company compliance.