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stevage 6 days ago

You are basically right. But your framing might be slightly off. The primary advantage in vector tiles for whoever is providing the map is not the small benefits of greater sharpness or flexibility in styling. It's the vast decrease in compute required. Maintaining the infrastructure to generate up to date raster tiles is a pretty serious undertaking.

I once spent a lot of time developing this very detailed style for planning cycle tours: https://stevebennett.me/2015/01/14/cycletour-org-a-better-ma...

I've tried a few times over the years to replicate it using vector tiles. It's pretty challenging to load enough detail into the tiles without hitting the size limits, and the default Mapbox tiles don't containing anything like enough information.

There are workarounds with vector tiles that raster tiles don't have though, like the ability to turn on/off different layers, while still retaining legibility (because labels can still be aware of what is underneath them).