I definitely see what you mean: it’d look bad from a big production, but it looks unbelievable to me from one person. I can’t quite comprehend it really.
I think YouTubers are conditioned to think it's impossible for one person to execute anything impressive because they're otherwise drowning in a sea of shit tier videos.
I don’t know about you, but these videos definitely fall into the impressive category for me. Looking at his publish history, he’s producing one of these videos every few months. Works like the one you link too usually take years for a single person to create.
Comparing someone’s passion art project to someone’s educational videos using CGI, is like complaining that every diagram in a physics text book isn’t a work of art on par with the Mona Lisa.
But I AM caning calling out millions of Youtube generations ago seem to live in a bubble of mediocrity and have no idea what a single person can create, let alone over 15 years ago per my example.
This is totally different tech and a totally different video.
It’s pretty easy to create photorealistic work in blender when you have high resolution textures and photogrammetry of what you’re reproducing, I’d challenge you to find similar textures of planets or every building in New York City.
The video authors focus seems to be mostly on the shaders and volumetrics used for the large scale “simulations” not on making insanely high fidelity assets for the speaker or etc.
It’s also worth noting that the most jenky thing by far in this video is the animations/facial simulations which are not even consistently solved in billion dollar productions yet, let alone one guy