libaom is a fucking joke. SVT might be a memory hog, but as the proud owner of a system with enough memory to run it, I can proudly say my 1 minute video rendered in less than ten minutes and somehow had worse compression than x264
I really want to know why they implemented a piece of software that's this complicated in assembly. Is it just speed? Then I also want to know what all the great numbers of video codecs I have just uncovered after clicking on "the input format must be .y4m" in their Readme.
Since OP seem to know about the 306 options of the official AOM encoder a little, and rav1e also sounds rather CLI-heavy, this also gets my uneducated head wondering where these products are used. Do other app developers drop it in like ffmpeg? Probably. It also sounds like Disney & Co. just have some servers that they have scripted to "encode the corporate fortune". How true is this?