Yeah, the article was painting with a bit too of a broad stroke IMO, though they did briefly acknowledge "special exceptions" such as satellite or medical imagery. It's very application-dependent.

That said, in my experience beginners do often overestimate how much image resolution is needed for a given task for some reason. I often find myself asking to retry their experiments with a lower resolution. There's a surprising amount of information in 128x128 or even smaller images.

The article basically argues: You would expect to get similarly good results with subsampling in practice. E.g. no need to process at 1920x1080 when you can do 960x540. Separately, you can break down many problems into smaller tiles and get similar quality results without the compute overheads of a high res ViT.