[conjectures]

There were some nice things about this article. However I wouldn't recommend it as a cure for confusion. E.g.

> in mean-field variational inference, we have parameters for each datapoint ... In the variational autoencoder setting, we do amortized inference where there is a set of global parameters ...

Mean-field implies the variational posterior is modelled as factorising over the different latent variables involved. Some latent variables can be local (unique to a data point) and some can be global (shared across data points).