what are .webp files and why has my online experience been plagued by them?
I don't know what a .webp file is but I don't like it. They're like a filthy prank version of the image/gif you're looking for. They make you jump through all these hoops to find the original versions of the files that you can actually do anything with.
Edit: honestly I assumed it had something to do with Google protecting themselves from image piracy shit
In my personal experience, when downloading .webp files I wasn't able to upload to the places I needed to much of the time. But I've always been able to just slap .jpg to the end of the file name as I used the save as function and that would make it work everywhere just fine.
In that context: Websites may offer alternative image formats for the same image. They may offer jpg alongside webp. It's just not easily discoverable by end users.
A pretty large amount of .JPG images are actually .WebP but people simply don’t notice for some strange reason. I’ve already seen several WebP images uploaded to WikiMedia with a JPG extension.
Just relaying what worked for me. Tried uploading with .webp and it didn't work, tried with .jpg and it did. Didn't matter to me whether it was a real conversion or not.