This first was considered many years ago simply because libvips was faster and used less memory for the operations we do with images. But since it was a lot of work for no visible benefit we let it on the backlog.
Nowadays, the LLM are finding bugs on every part of the stack, and image processing is the major surface area for that. This mean that libvips being more popular among WebApps handling images gives us a larger umbrella for this new challenge.