I recall those claims being made by a company called "Euclidean", from Australia I think. Online rumors suggested they might have been using octtrees, but later Euclidean videos flatly denied that.
It's Euclideon. And it is octtrees. My interpretation after reading a fascinating Reddit thread [1] is that these denials were misdirection. There's definitely new interest in splatting techniques (Gaussian in particular), though they've long been an alternative to triangles in the 3D world. I think it'd be fun to experiment with implementing some of that using modern compute shaders.
