VAAPI works on the integrated GPUs as well. There’s a table of supported codecs here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hardware_video_acceleration#Comparison_tables
Unfortunately they never bothered to get things integrated into Mesa and they have 2 different packages.
It has been a while since I reinstalled Fedora KDE but I don’t think it swaps mesa/ffmpeg/gstreamer to the freeworld version automatically, it just enables the repository for it.