rav1e is generally head to head with libaom on static images, and which one wins on the speed/quality/size frontier depends a lot on the image and settings, as much as +/- 20%. I suspect rav1e has an inefficient block size selection algorithm, so the particular shape of blocks is a make or break for it.

I’ve only compared rav1e to mozjpeg and libwebp, and at fastest speeds it’s only barely ahead.

Difficult to know without reproduction steps from the article, but I would think it behaves better than libaom for the same quality setting.

Edit: found https://github.com/xiph/rav1e/issues/2759

If Rav1e found better ways of encoding, why would the aom folks copy it in libaom?