A DESCRIPTION OF THE PROBLEM :
ImageIO has support for JPG / PNG since forever, but JDK built-in support for newer formats would be a good idea sooner or later.

The ImageIO plug-in mechanism allows 3rd party libraries to add support for newer image formats. There are Java libraries that wrap libavif / libwebp / etc but adding platform-dependent libraries makes deployment difficult.

Adding AVIF support (via libavif) to the JDK for all platforms would be nice so that there's always at least one modern image format available.

I expect no progress on this particular enhancement request for at least a few years, until we know which modern image format (webp, avif, jpeg xl, etc) comes out on top. It'd be good to have an enhancement request like this in the system for discussion, since it'll make more and more sense as time as the years go by.