Some of you might remember when a 3mb flash animation could pack in some 5 minutes of animation, with the more advanced ones even having chapter/scene selectors, which could also include clickable easter eggs and other kinds of interactions during the scenes.
I don’t think it’s as ubiquitous as you think. 1080p is pretty much standard (aside from old videos), 4K is still high-end and most uploading to that on YT are probably more tech-leaning channels who actually do use it. I even see new stuff from TV corps that’s still only 1080p.
4K if you’re using a full-raster workflow is taxing at every step. Display, CPU/GPU (for software stability, filters/effects), RAM and storage, internet upload speed, also camera (and fast storage there too) where relevant. Also backups, and maybe even higher-res workflow to allow room to crop/re-frame if needed.
I imagine it must be a disappointment to actually buy a 4K monitor for content viewing, stuck watching 1080p on new videos because the creators can’t afford that workflow or just don’t care. Even stuff that is 4K might have issues with encoding quality due to cost-cutting (or requires higher subscription cost).
8K is a thing too (but even more impractical), so the problem is repeated there too.
So yeah, I would say it is a meaningful difference that vector doesn’t have this problem.
Tbh, Vector only marginally solves that issue. If it’s a filmed video, then it doesn’t solve it at all, since it just creates “vector pixels” instead, which don’t scale either. So it would only work for artificially created videos, and there it would only work for 2D content, and only 2D content that doesn’t use bitmaps in it.
It’s quite a limited subset of the videos one might watch. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I watched a 2D purely PC generated video that wasn’t a screen recording from some game (which is, almost per definition, also rasterized).
The other problem there is that vector graphics can be rasterized into however many pixels you want, but the detail from the source material doesn’t improve. Yes, the edges around a flat area are smoother, but it’s still edges around a flat area.
Compare the best flash animation you can find with some random demo video on youtube (or if you want to go to the extreme: with the graphics of some hollywood CGI). The infinite scalability of vector graphics won’t make the flash animation look better than the raster graphics image.
The “infinite scalability” of vector graphics are a mostly academic point unless you are e.g. designing a company logo that needs to look sharp both on a tiny stamp and on the side of the corporate headquarter.