Neat theory, but AFAIK just the opposite. At least, as a young optical engineer, I was bombarded with technical experts proclaiming with great assurance that "digital would never fully replace film photography", because "its resolution would never compare".

And yet, if you took a crayon and continued the line of maximum resolution achieved on a single chip... that line wasn't plateauing.

Somehow, everyone believed Moore's Law, but not as it applied to detectors (which are basically transistors, which is what Moore's Law discusses).

Curious how to async walk a tree which may or may not be under edit operations without a mutex

There are RCU safe trees like the maple tree in Linux: https://docs.kernel.org/core-api/maple_tree.html

The tl;dr is that it uses garbage collection to let readers see the older version of the tree they were walking while the latest copy still gets updated.

I read a paper recently about concurrent interval skip lists the other day as well which was interesting.