This is irrelevant, what matters is the consumption of the format, not its production.

Isn't that circular reasoning? Chrome shouldn't support JPEG-XL because not enough consumers support it? Chrome is the number one consumer of images. If Chrome added support, suddenly 90% of people would be able to use the format.

(Also EOG and IrfanView are image viewers, not production tools.)

Yeah, to me this is another sign that Chrome's dominance is a menace to the open web. Whatever the best outcome is here, it's very concerning to me that a possibly important improvement can be blocked with so little meaningful explanation.

The explanation is pretty plain: google controls the webp format, jxl competes with webp.

In what way does Google control WebP? They have frozen the format and nothing will be added to it. WebP2 was abandoned. Google is also involved with JPEG XL - actually some developers that worked on WebP now work on JPEG XL.

If someone controls something it is the Chromium/AOM/AVIF/AV1 team that controls and decides what multimedia formats go inside Chrome/Chromium thus controlling what is used on the web and ignoring what the web community has to say about it.

Consumption wasn't possible in standard Chrome. So that's hardly a benchmark.

Can't really consume it if it's locked behind a flag. 99% of chrome users never touch the flags at all.

In that case WebP, CSS grid, CSS shadow DOM, HTML5, or any other new feature on the web would be untennable (esp. if deployed behind a feature flag first) because when those were created and implemented in browsers there was no uses/consumption of them.