You can choose to believe what you want, in reality Google decided to nuke people their battery for fringe benefit to themselves. They flipped the switch way ahead of broad hardware decode support.
You need to put your statement in context of the thread you're trying to lecture on.
The context is that in mid-2010 the majority of the codecs used on the web were based on a closed licensing system, which is objectively true based on the provided information.
Your statement that Google enabled and enforced the codec prior to HW-decoding support is not wrong because of that, just your overall attitude on dealing with information is.
Reason: There was also no widespread VP8 HW-decoding support in 2011 and 2012 in most devices. Mobile chipsets vendors (Qualcomm, Samsung, TI,...) only added HW-decoding for VP8 from 2012 premium tier chipsets, so VP8 was SW-decoded on many devices in the market well into ~2014.
But in mid-2010 (!!) there was no Browser able to handle VP8 even in Software, and no meaningful embedded device supported the codec either
