*groan*
The whole Mesa proprietary codecs hardware acceleration debacle is such a mess, and it seems Manjaro literally took the most illogical, inconsistent approach out of all distros currently dealing with this.

From my understanding Fedora basically yeeted everything with a patent from a default install, and they decided Mesa hardware video acceleration for h264/h265 should be a part of that. Fair enough, and consistent with yeeting non-free codecs.

Manjaro also decided to disable hardware video acceleration for patented codecs, but it makes no sense, seeing how non-free codecs ARE included in a default install.

I've read through their forums (which honestly I've rarely had to ever do), and it doesn't seem like anyone understands what the Manjaro team is trying to accomplish. You can't exactly claim you're avoiding a lawsuit as long as you're still including software based decoders for the same non-free video formats.
I've seen people ask numerous times, why disable Mesa h264/h265 capabilities, but include other software that accomplish the same thing, i.e. encoding and decoding those patented formats. But no one gave a clear answer.

GG Linux for shooting yourself in the foot again. Please stop acting surprised as to why people prefer Windows.