Worse: while, as a technical user with decades of *nix experience (SunOS since 4.1.x, FreeBSD since 2.x, Linux since Red Hat [not Enterprise] 6, NEXTSTEP and its successors since 3.3, etc.), I've never had trouble getting hardware decoding working in Linux browsers with a little elbow grease, the overall support picture is not straightforward at all.

Whether hardware decoding works in browsers on Linux depends on the Linux distro, the browser, the hardware, and how the browser is packaged and configured.

It may be disabled by default. X11 backends may in some cases have broader decode support than Wayland backends or vice versa. And at least one popular distro, Fedora, packages video decoding libraries with patent-encumbered codecs disabled, which need to be replaced with libraries from a third-party repo for hardware decoding to work except in the case of applications installed via packaging mechanisms that vendor dependencies like Flatpak.