I'm a huge Adrian fan boy <3

Yes, bokeh blur is way more pleasing. In my article the gaussian likes are the focus for their use as a basic building block for other effects, like frosted glass, heat distortions, bloom and the like.

Specifically the 2015 Dual Kawase was created in the context of mobile graphics, with weak memory throughput. But even on my RTX 4090, near the fastest consumer hardware available, those unoptimized unseparable, naive gaussian implementations bring it to a crawl and `samplePosMultiplier` has a non insignificant performance hit, so texture caches still play a role.

At today's high resolutions and especially on mobile, we still need smart and optimized algorithms like the dual kawase.