For example, see this camera icon: https://useiconic.com/icons/camera-slr/ (in the left pane, click the "three squares" icon to render them all at the same size). All three are vectors (you can inspect them if you want), but they still show different levels of detail. If you take the high-detail icon and render it at a small size, the details add visual clutter that are hard to understand at a small output size. Or with this book icon (https://useiconic.com/icons/book/), if you go the other way and scale the small book up to a larger size, it's harder to tell what it is because the "pages" part at the bottom is so thick -- which was a design necessity at smaller outputs, or it'd have been invisible, but at larger sizes it's too thick.
So even with vectors, the essential takeaway of this particular challenge still stands:
> [how to] distill the essence of your design and make sure your icon is clear and understandable at all sizes
Every vector icon still gets rasterized at some point for displaying to your monitor's pixel grid, not to mention human perception. Vectorization is a transport/delivery concern, but in and of itself it doesn't replace the thoughtful design of the pixel era.
Fonts can work similarly... they are usually vector these days, but still each glyph can look different at different sizes and can be dynamically controlled to look better at different render sizes: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-optica...
Even at the larger sizes, a vector won't always look great. If the renderer doesn't fudge vector edges to snap to pixel edges, you'll end up with blurry edges instead of clean, sharp ones.
Do you have an example? Text is essentially "vector" these days, and I've never heard of anyone complaining that text rendered on a modern screen has blurry edges. The blurriness of some text is often "cleartype" or whatever tricks are being used to make it look better on low-dpi screens, which end up making it worse on modern displays.
Because of this obvious fact, I offered a common explanation among those designers I know that produced pixel art: that they simply do not consider the particulars of how pixel art was rendered on cathode ray tubes. Hence /perhaps/, a possibility is presented.
I find your counter-argument superficial and perhaps intentionally missing the point.
That being said, there were also a couple of years in the 2000’s where pixel-based icons were specifically designed for LCD.
This has been an issue with application icons on Windows for a long time. For many applications the largest icon would be 32x32. So when they changed the default desktop icon size to 48x48, those all looked terrible. I hated seeing blurry icons enough that I would make a larger version myself if I couldn't find a decent replacement online
In some cases I would actually need to make a custom 16x16 or 24x24 icon, because whoever made the icon went the easy route of just scaling down a larger icon to create the small ones. Even if the source is a vector, most icons will not scale down to those sizes and retain readability since the details disappear. Alignment to the pixel grid is essential for tiny icons. In these cases I would have to use Resource Hacker to modify the icon stored in the executable (for desktop icons that wasn't needed since you can change a shortcut to use any icon file).
That future is still as far away as it was 20 years ago.
So, another 10-20 years before nor requiring a pixel grid becomes a reality? So why pretend we don't need it now?