Why H.265/H.266/H.267 cannot beat H.264 at 1080p archival-grade encoding?

[birdie-github]

I will put it bluntly: I don't care about 4K/8K encoded using relatively low bitrate settings. Not my use case by a long shot.

Why can't new codecs beat ages old H.264 at 1080p archival-grade encoding, that is when visually (nearly completely lossless) lossless encoding is at stake?

It's not just my sentiment/research, most people agree with that.

E.g.

Yes, x265 can achieve archival-grade quality with the right settings (no-sao and the like). But I share the sentiment that all these modern codecs are a let-down, it being a struggle to achieve transparency with them at reasonable bitrates. I sometimes wonder where all those CPU cycles go. It's as if H.264 hit critical mass of compression technology.

We have shifted to we need higher / best quality at minimal bitrate, instead of having bare minimum / good enough quality at lowest possible bitrate. The two are very different.

In terms of computational complexity vvenc is probably 100 to 1000 times more expensive than x264 but for grainy 1080p sources it often needs higher bitrate to preserve all the detail. That sounds almost crazy.