Yes all my arguments apply to my hypothetical codec. Where did I imply otherwise?
If you want your codec to be adopted despite lack of hardware/software support, you really need to offer something worth the hassle. Notably reduced buffering wait times for consumers, and lower bandwidth costs and ease of distribution (encoder/decoder) for pirates would be such needs worth the hassle. WebM is worse in all these cases. Very few people care about royalties, so it's simply not enough to ask everyone to swap out all the hardware and other infrastructure for mostly ideological fluff.
You actually need to make a better codec. And so far there is nothing out there (H265 and VP9 don't have a usable encoder/decoder).
My point was that Google is providing the software and hardware support[1], in conjunction with every big name you could mention, with a short list of notable exceptions, therefore overall it is as strong as another hypothetical royalty-free codec which is technically better, but which has less hardware, software or industry support.
In short "better" codec means more than just compression efficiency and asking people to switch out their infrastructure for a quality improvement is as tough as for a cost reduction. It only happens now because the whole industry acts in concert to make it happen. There's no reason why the industry couldn't coalesce around a free codec next time if the "idealogues" and "hippies" have laid sufficient groundwork, either with no business case or one that only works in certain niches. This is how it has worked in many other free software or free content success story.
[1] this doesn't seem to be widely known. If you google for WebM then one of the twitter results is Joe Hewitt asking smugly when Google will announce hardware and Youtube support for WebM, something they'd done about a year previously.
If you want your codec to be adopted despite lack of hardware/software support, you really need to offer something worth the hassle. Notably reduced buffering wait times for consumers, and lower bandwidth costs and ease of distribution (encoder/decoder) for pirates would be such needs worth the hassle. WebM is worse in all these cases. Very few people care about royalties, so it's simply not enough to ask everyone to swap out all the hardware and other infrastructure for mostly ideological fluff.
You actually need to make a better codec. And so far there is nothing out there (H265 and VP9 don't have a usable encoder/decoder).