WebP stands on its own merits but it's profoundly annoying that as of Pop OS 22.04 I still have to open them up in Firefox instead of Eye of Gnome. Compatibility issues like this are littered everywhere. This laziness on the part of supporting WebP is a significant driver of continued use of PNG.
Yes, it's very disheartening. We're approaching two decades of WebP, after all. At this point it's not even worth implementing its support because JXL is superior in every use case.
Open a bug report on Eye of Gnome. WebP has no issues opening on all of the native MacOS tooling. Since this is an open source program it should be fairly easy to submit a PR to bring in webP support.