This was easier to rely on in the days before ray tracing, when texture filtering was consistent because everything was from the camera. Ray differentials from incoherent rays aren't quite as forgiving.
> If you don’t know how an asset is to be used it makes sense to texture all of it upfront as if it will be full screen, 4K.
4k textures for large parts of the asset in the UV layout can be an acceptable amount of overkill. That's not the same as putting 65,000 4k textures on something because each little part is given its own 4k texture. I know that you know this, but I'm not sure why you would conflate those two things.
> Taking an asset off final to ‘Upres’ it for a can be a pain in the ass and more costly than just detailing it up in the first place
It is very rare that specific textures need to be redone like that and it is not a big deal.
650GB of textures for one asset drags everything from iterations to final renders to disk usage to disk activity to network usage down for every shot in a completely unnecessary way. There isn't a fine line between these things, there is a giant gap between that much excessive texture resolution and needing to upres some piece because it gets close to the camera.
> Asset creation often starts a long time before shots or cameras are locked down.
This is actually fairly rare.
> In isolation it’s a insane amount of detail and given perfect production planning it is normally not needed, but until directors lock down the scripts and shots it can be the simplest option.
That's rarely how the time line fits together. It's irrelevant though, because there is no world where 65,000 4k textures on a single asset makes sense. It's multiple orders of magnitude out of bounds of reality.
I am glad that you have that insane amount of scalability as a focus since you are making tools that people rely on heavily, and I wish way more people on the tools end thought like this. Still, it is about 1000x what would set off red flags in my mind.
I apologize on behalf of whoever told you that was necessary, because they need to learn how to work within reasonable resources (which is not difficult given modern computers), no matter what project or organization they are attached to.