when I was researching jpeg-xl I've stumbled upon an alternative image viewer. It's been only a couple of minutes since I've been tinkering with it but I feel like Qt5 is so much better than IrfanView.
qimgv - minimalistic, performant, and highly configurable image viewer. I've spent a lot of time with alternatives like sxiv, feh, pqiv, nomacs, but they each have some significant flaws either in terms of performance or features.
ums - Universal Media Server