It is a very common, and often overlooked issue in image processing. Bilinear is widely used, and not particularly good. For large factor downscaling it is reminiscent of nearest pixel.
Bilinear interpolation is perfectly acceptable for zooming-in an image (making it larger by adding new pixel values). If you want to zoom-out, you have can still use bilinear interpolation, but of course you have to filter the image data beforehand to avoid aliasing.