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.
I have a vivid memory of playing Rise of the Triad[1] against my buddy over serial cable. As most PC games from back then, it used mode 13h[2], so 320x200 resolution with a 256 color palette.
I have the distinct memory of firing a rocket at him from far away because I thought that one pixel had the wrong color, and killing him to his great frustration. Good times.
You can play the shareware portion of the game here[3] to get an idea.
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.
Yes, you do. Also, 1024x1024 is not high resolution.
An example is segmenting basic 1920x1080 (FHD) video in 60 Hz formats.