Look, I know you're being snarky, but YES. All of the viable open-source video codecs of the past 10 years would not have happened without Google. Not just for technical reasons, but for expensive patent-related legal reasons too.

Given that ffmpeg is an open-source video transcoding tool, I don't think you can easily just dismiss this as "big company abuses open source."

The ffmpeg devs are volunteers or paid to work on specific parts of the tool. That's why they're unimpressed. What Google is doing here is pretty reasonable.

I don't think ffmpeg is terribly affected by whether a codec is patent-encumbered or not

It would certainly be a less useful tool if all the videos it produced got you legal threats every time you tried to share them :)