I think the article is slightly misleading: it says "Google has resumed work on JPEG XL", but I don't think they have - their announcement only says they "would welcome contributions" to implement JPEG XL support. In other words, Google won't do it themselves, but their new position is they're now willing to allow someone else to do the work.
Describing it as 'Google' is misleading, because different arms of the company might as well be completely different companies. The Chrome org seems to have had the same stance as Firefox with regards to JPEG XL: "we don't want to add 100,000 lines of multithreaded C++ because it's a giant gaping security risk", and the JPEG XL team (in a completely separate org) is addressing those concerns by implementing a Rust version. I'd guess that needing the "commitment to long-term maintenance" is Chrome fighting with Google Research or whatever about long-term headcount allocation towards support: Chrome doesn't want the JPEG XL team to launch and abandon JPEG XL in chrome and leaving Chrome engineers to deal with the fallout.
It's technically correct. Googlers (at Google Research Zurich) have been working on jxl-rs, a Rust implementation of JPEG XL. Google Research has been involved in JPEG XL from the beginning, both in the design of the codec and in the implementation of libjxl and now jxl-rs.
But until now, the position of other Googlers (in the Chrome team) was that they didn't want to have JPEG XL support in Chrome. And that changed now. Which is a big deal.
Yes and they will also only accept it if the library is written in Rust. The patch to add support that is in the thread, and referenced in the article uses libjxl which is C++ and therefore cannot be used.
