WebP's lossy codec is based on VP8 intraframes; the lossless codec is original. Either mode of which is contained in a RIFF file, which is where the dimension limits happen (RIFF's headers have enough space to represent 2^14-1).
WebM is, strictly speaking, a container format that is a subset of Matroska. It doesn't have any real relation to WebP.
One solution would be to hold multiple images inside of another wrapper container like zip. The client code would have to handle stitching them together.
I agree those limits are too small.