@aral @nekohayo
In case you're actually be interested in what's happening rather than just ranting:
Quite a few people (including me) have been working their asses off on gnome-shell/gstreamer/pipewire for the last two years in order to use hardware encoders out of the box (no large project dared to use hw encoders on linux by default so far). Also we're using the faster h264 sw encoder instead of vp8 in gnome-shell now when available (it must be manually installed on Fedora because patents).