Can the now popular VP9 video hardware decoder be tricked into decoding an "image"?

All this "Webp bad!" talk recently has me curious about something. Since the slop image codec is based on the VP8 video codec, wouldn't it then be possible to also punk out another format like this using VP9? Webp 2 seems to point to this but apparently it's an abandoned project.

https://chromium.googlesource.com/codecs/libwebp2/

Anyway how could this work? I doubt it's as simple as

ffmpeg in.png c:v libvpx-vp9 out.webm

>>105967195
You can't because as software support grows websites no longer fallback to jpg. You'd get an empty webpage without images and since you're not paying hosting costs you're not gonna convince them to go back to using jpg.