I would say intra refresh solves a different problem. You still have to wait for the intra refresh to cover the frame before you can start watching properly. That takes just as long as waiting for a keyframe, and needs slightly more bytes.

The benefit of intra refresh is that you avoid having any particularly large frames. If you're using a sub-second buffer, then intra refresh makes your maximum frame size much smaller without sacrificing quality. It's a godsend for getting latency down to tiny amounts. But if you have 1 or 2 seconds of buffer then it's no big deal if a keyframe is an order of magnitude bigger than other frames, and intra refresh is pointless.

Also it's not really a codec thing, it's a clever encoder trick that you can do on basically anything.