At least with SDL3, you don't even need the renderer or the texture anymore. SDL_GetWindowSurface to get the surface and SDL_UpdateWindowSurface to present. That's the more software-graphics you can get from my understanding of the library. SDL still does the double-buffering for you.
SDL has always made it easy to directly present a software buffer of pixels to the screen. I'm not sure why someone would want to use the renderer/texture thing for this use case.
The noise from this technique would come from moving lights and world-space disocclusions. Lights don't move erratically in most scenes, objects maybe. But even then, this handles diffuse illumination only, which by its nature has low frequency noise. You won't get noise by shaking the camera violently like in an FPS, for example, which you would from modern ray/path-traced pipelines and I assume is what you're complaining about. So on the list of temporal techniques, this one is probably the most graceful to the noise/lag trade-off.
"Crisp, noise-free, instant graphics" that were also incorrect and did not communicate mood and depth the way GI does. I see no reason to go back.
But jokes aside, I'm curious too. Nothing there seems too extravagant, people move abroad all the time. Maybe it then takes them 30 years to realize they didn't have it so bad after all and move back. I'm not speaking for the US here specifically, but more generally. Those longer term stories I think are more interesting.
For a long time at my previous job, I had an empty desk that I would deploy my laptop onto every morning, then pack and leave the desk empty again when I left. People jokingly asked whether I had been fired when they saw the empty desk. A regular 15" screen and no clutter in my field of view greatly improved my concentration.
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