I think it's something people keep rediscovering. It's a pretty fun programming problem that lets you explore lots of different domains at the same time (video processing, color theory, different coordinate systems for visualizing things) and you get a tangible "cool" piece of art at the end of your effort.

I built one of these back in the day. Part of the fun was seeing how fast I could make the pipeline. Once I realized that FFMPEG could read arbitrary byte ranges directly from S3, I went full ham into throwing machines at the problem. I could crunch through a 4 hour movie in a few seconds by distributing the scene extraction over an army lambdas (while staying in the free tier!). Ditto for color extraction and presentation. Lots of fun was had.