Current gen intel and amd gpus support vaapi out of the box on fedora in both chromium and firefox. DRM nonsense is orthogonal and unrelated to linux.

There have been leaps and bounds of progress in the last few years. Youtube hardware acceleration works perfectly in chrome/firefox now (assuming you have working video drivers).

As far as I know netflix still limits you to 720p under most browsers (although their support page shows that opera of all things supports 1080p)

I watch Freetube and Netflix on my Starlite tablet and it works well. Works on the laptop too, though I don't watch there.

libva is usually installed these days but you can install it manually. For Netflix you'll need to install widevine.

Who knows, it's 2026 now.