That's like saying quantization isn't real because the frontier labs aren't using it in their production inference.

This is a lossy process, it produces worse results. It might be worth it for some situations, but applying it to everything would just be making your SOTA model worse

Isn't this just quantization with extra steps? Can converting the text to an image really be a better way to lossily compress it? (Not that I have any idea what I'm talking about on this topic.)