Use JWT over HTTPS to RealtimeDB. Has the same presence detection as MQTT. A lot cheaper too. I actually like it better than using MQTT. All of our devices attach to multiple RealtimeDB and then we sweep the data into Firestore for human interaction. Front end for RealtimeDB is open source so you can port it.
I suspect the main reason they created a new codec is to collect a few billion in royalties.
The most obvious choice here was to allow MP3 as a codec choice, but the patents are all expired on MP3 so that's not a revenue source. Doing that would have avoided recoding for most music.
Every Bluetooth chip I've seen has enough CPU to decode any of these codecs. The only question would be power consumption during decoding.