peacethroughpower said:
Internet speeds are improving everywhere all the time.

Is latency improving at a comparable rate? Raw bandwidth will continue to improve, probably. But for a consistent experience you need lower latency. Easiest way to get lower latency over a variety of connections is to just serve less data.

I'd also point out that larger screens just keep getting cheaper and cheaper. It was 1080p, then 1440p, then 4K.

Sure. We'll eventually get there, but the pressure on video will presumably continue proportionately, so any image encoding developed will probably be a video codec spinoff like WebP is.

Basically I just don't see any possible scenario in which the average user will be sufficiently inconvenienced to lead to the kind of modernization you'd like. You need a lot more THIS JUST ISN'T PRACTICAL AND I'M NOT GONNA PUT UP WITH IT happening.