Hardware accelerated handling was one of the arguments used to oppose a WASM based implementation that sites could use at will to prove that there's demand for JPEG-XL support (and that the Chrome team provides, by the way).
No it wasn't. WASM implementations are simply slower than native support. No browser uses HW accelerated decode for AVIF images or JXL. I think Safari might use HW for JPEG, but that's it across all browsers.
