The outcomes are definitely less of a win for the open web in many cases. It is astounding that I have to deal with Apple proponents unironically trying to argue that WebM and Opus are bad things.
Of course Safari on iOS supports Opus, but it just doesn't support it in any standard container... which is one of the most pointless things I can think of.
Wikimedia doesn't care. They just load a polyfill with WebAssembly-compiled codecs for VP8/9/AV1/Opus/etc. and do it on CPU. The net effect is that iPhone users get a worse Wikipedia experience for basically no reason.
I don't disagree that support for open codecs should be more of a priority for Apple/Safari/WebKit. But you're missing the bigger picture. The web should be resilient to clients which don't support all of the latest features. It shouldn't be necessary to be using a bleeding edge version of Google Chrome (or its clones) in order to have a first class web browsing experience.
While one might complain about the inconvenience of supporting the few gaps in Safari on iOS, this complaint is actually of having to support people who don't (or can't) run the latest software because they (for example) haven't chosen to pay money to upgrade their computing device to something which supports Windows 10 or a recent release of MacOS.
The fact that Safari on iOS isn't bleeding edge is actually an under-appreciated gift to people who choose to/are forced to run older software. It's one of the last vectors forcing lazy web developers (i.e. most web developers) to continue taking browser diversity seriously.
Of course Safari on iOS supports Opus, but it just doesn't support it in any standard container... which is one of the most pointless things I can think of.
Wikimedia doesn't care. They just load a polyfill with WebAssembly-compiled codecs for VP8/9/AV1/Opus/etc. and do it on CPU. The net effect is that iPhone users get a worse Wikipedia experience for basically no reason.