imo, the problem isn't that WebP is bad for photos.
The problem is that Google's Pagespeed Insights and consequently a lot of resources push WebP to you as a solution for your JPG problems.
A lot of people have been duped into reencoding their JPEGs into WebPs for no reason.
Also just my personal feelings, but I feel like Google doesn't care about people downloading images or using the internet as a permanent gallery for posterity. They don't care about making each individual image look as good as it can be, so someone can in 10 years visit an almost-defunct website or an abandoned account of some user and just view a photograph as a standalone work. It feels like the use-case they're concerned with are the huge 1200px wide, utterly useless and generally irrelevant stock images they forced everyone to put on their articles when they said AMP articles require an image that big. And of course, with the thumbnails automatically generated from such images. That is, WebP's concern seems to be just about the load on the web server, and it's not thinking about the image as a file (the sort you save on your computer). Then again, this is just my strongly opinionated guess based on nothing but the fact JPG was made before the web became what it is today, and WebP was released after mobile internet access surpassed desktop.
The problem is that Google's Pagespeed Insights and consequently a lot of resources push WebP to you as a solution for your JPG problems.
A lot of people have been duped into reencoding their JPEGs into WebPs for no reason.
Also just my personal feelings, but I feel like Google doesn't care about people downloading images or using the internet as a permanent gallery for posterity. They don't care about making each individual image look as good as it can be, so someone can in 10 years visit an almost-defunct website or an abandoned account of some user and just view a photograph as a standalone work. It feels like the use-case they're concerned with are the huge 1200px wide, utterly useless and generally irrelevant stock images they forced everyone to put on their articles when they said AMP articles require an image that big. And of course, with the thumbnails automatically generated from such images. That is, WebP's concern seems to be just about the load on the web server, and it's not thinking about the image as a file (the sort you save on your computer). Then again, this is just my strongly opinionated guess based on nothing but the fact JPG was made before the web became what it is today, and WebP was released after mobile internet access surpassed desktop.