I skimmed the article to get the tl;dr, which seems to be that there is an appropriate level of detail (LOD) for icons of different sizes, and that therefore vector graphics won't work.

True, and false. All you would need is a vector graphics format with a per-element LOD specification. Here's an example of one format and editor which does that:

http://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/applications/icon-...

Well, small-size icons are not going to be the source of the application package size issue, are they? I mean if pixel-perfecting 16x16, 32x32 and 64x64 icons is something we do already, using svg against the other end of the scaling problem (1024x768 -> 2048x1536) is a good solution.

That is a good article.