This conversation is all useless unless @philm is reading these.
I don’t think manjaro will change their inconsistent approach with regard to patents. Removing all patented codecs would mean that every new user will be left to himself/herself to find codecs somehow to play them at all. That would give the distro far more bad reputation and discourage user adoption.
Ideally, I would have preferred they cared about mesa as much as they care about intel-vaapi, h264, h265 etc. Or just move them all to a different repo that user has to enable from pamac manually or preferably in calamares installer itself (kind of like fedora). That would be the true implementation of better safe than sorry approach. The current approach is simply better do whats in trend