That sentence kind of makes the rest of it moot, though? Everyone knows HEVC and AV1 on bare (unaccelerated hardware) is rough even on modern machines.
I don't think it does. It was only making the point that by at least one dimension it's conceivable that modern video could be sent over old connections because of modern advancement in compression.
In an alternate universe where HEVC existed in the 90's, conceivably intel could have included hardware to assist in decoding it.
