I’m looking forward to lots of good things coming in the future on the new WordPress core Performance Team blog, and I’m glad SVG and WebP are finally going to be usable in WordPress by default. (This is already the case in some hosting environments.) But the forced on-by-default generation of WebP images when you upload something else — someone will have to explain the sense of that to me.
WebP by default seems like a gift to Google. If it was certain the WebP files will always be smaller than the images they replace, that might be worth it, just for the performance and energy-efficiency gains.
