[lostdog]

NeRFs were cool, but it turns out you get just-as-good results by fitting these Gaussian blobs. Plus it's faster. Plus the representation of gaussians is much easier to edit than the opaque neural representation.

It's better than other representations because...no one has been able to reconstruct scenes with other representations this well.

Gaussian splatting is not popular because it's a good rendering method. It's popular because there's now a good technique for generating great 3d gaussian splats from 2d images. And now that you have gaussian splats, it's nice to render them quickly.