You're going to be proven wrong in weeks to months. Just a couple of years ago the consensus was that DALL-E/Imagen/Stable Diffusion quality image generation was impossible. Now it's very real and quality is improving every month.
They continued building off their latent diffusion direction (encode with vqgan-vae and then diffusion in latent space)
All roads lead to rome
https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.10752