Society doesn't need a new image format. I'd wager to say not any new multimedia format. Big corporate entites do, and have churning them out at a steady pace.
Look at poor webp - a format pushed by the largest industry players - and the abysmal everyday use it gets, and the hate it generates.
Estimates are that 95% of Internet users have a browser that supports WebP and that ~25% of the top million websites serve WebP images. I wouldn't call that abysmal.
Edit: and good luck uploading the format to the majority of webforms that aren’t faang.
Interns won't want to work on a dead end like this. Moreso they need to be supervised by someone that doesn't want to get removed by being the lowest X% usefulness in a company. So all these existing tools that aren't primary revenue generators just sit on coast mode.
Let’s also not forget the dependency mess that leaves in applications before we do though..
Better image formats serve entities who store images at scale, not end users.