There's always a tradeoff that evens it out anyway, isn't there.

Not at all, Microsoft has been announcing this since a couple of years back. And I imagine there will be a transition period, of course, you know how these things go, especially in enterprise/government environments. There's no Windows 12 (as of now), this is happening for Windows 11, right now, in a future Patch Tuesday update.

Well it's more of the GPU's job once the bitstream spec is frozen so I am sure NVIDIA's GPUs will handle it just fine. Decoding such complex encoding on CPU is not a good idea for smooth stutter-free playback, better to use old-gen codec which has GPU decoding