It's true that going to the trouble of costumes and video editing is at least some effort. However yesterday had more than its fair share of very low effort Photoshops and year after year, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
To the original question, the alleged original prank still outweighs any contemporary green screen antics: producing multiple physical fake boxes, distributing them across town in multiple stores, and getting local news to pick up on it. That's a lot of work.
The effort/motivation ratio makes far more sense for the 1996 prank than for the 2021 one. The 1996 one works out: a group of co-workers, at a company with a divisive reputation but desperately longing for being considered cool, a year after the Windows 95 release campaign made shrink-wrapped cardboard boxes the centerpiece of attention. And 1996: from Microsoft Word Art to pirated copies of Quark Express, losing themselves to print preparation screen time was just something people did, in the 90ies.
The hypothetical 2021 prank? Why Microsoft? Why Java? Why the completely forgotten medium of cardboard boxes?
To the original question, the alleged original prank still outweighs any contemporary green screen antics: producing multiple physical fake boxes, distributing them across town in multiple stores, and getting local news to pick up on it. That's a lot of work.