It’s also partly the patent holders for H.265.

H.264 had a license fee, but it wasn’t ridiculous. It was jacked up for 265, to the point that a lot of software houses no longer bundle the 265 decoder license.

It annoys me too: Security cameras often use turnkey H.265 encoding packages rather than more open codecs, which makes dealing with the files using FOSS more of a pita.