We have a 3D environment with spatial audio. Audio is encoded server-side, and since it's spatial everyone needs their own mix. We're using Opus, and audio encoding turns out to be the usual limiting factor on small servers.

So this kind of thing is exactly up our alley: an alternate option that uses less CPU than Opus, but consumes less bandwidth than raw audio.

But adding supporting for FLAC is also on our list. It seems nicely performant when compared to Opus.

in https://phoboslab.org/log/2023/04/qoa-specification he got ffmpeg on one core of an i7-6700k (which is arguably 'modern hardware') to encode a 9807-second file in mp3 in 146.2 seconds, 67× faster than real time. but qoa was 25.75 seconds, 5.7 times faster than that. qoa decoding was 2.5× as fast as dr_mp3

you can imagine situations where reducing the number of audio encoding servers in your audio encoding cluster by a factor of 6 would be a big win, or where you want to encode 100+ audio streams in real time on your laptop (maybe an sdr tuned to every am radio station at once), but i agree with you that battery-constrained devices are a more likely application area: making your audio recorder battery last twice as long is a much bigger win