I assume this is sarcasm? I mean it boils down to personal preference I guess but the video you're praising here is imho more of a typical example for bad 3D,
If that is your preference/opinion, then you are
certainly in the very minority lol. In anime community I really, really rarely seen anybody complained about Ufotable's fighting scenes. It's almost always being universally praised as having higher fighting scene presentation than most other anime studios.
its done not because it looks great but because it's cheap.
According to google average anime episode budget is only $140k-180k.
Demon slayer ova is 15m for the movie, tv version is about 900k per episode. It actually has FAR higher budget than average anime episode. Not sure how is this cheap.
Unless you are comparing to Arcane(10m per episode) directly. Arcane is on the very high end when it comes to budget, their budget is not average. still not a fair comparison anyways.
Also just FYI, western 3D animation(and live action movies too)often use 2D in background because they are cheaper to create than an equally detailed 3D background. So it's not like western studios never try to save money.....
A good example for good combination of 2D with 3D, even though arguably not strictly anime, would be the Arcane series. Looks good but most likely wasn't cheap at all.
I am not sure why Arcane is the one being compared aesthetically.
Isn't it a 3D animation made by a western studio? So it's not even anime. Nor its target audience anime fans. They use a completely different production methods from Japanese anime.
Japanese anime is still primarily 2D, because anime fans prefer "flat" or manga looks for a character, sometimes they want manga-ish presentation which is best done in 2D. Afaik 3D is used for camera rotation or certain objects in anime.
Western 3D animation has a completely different production pipeline. In a 3D pipeline characters are modelled/rigged/keyed in 3D and background can be 2D or 3D depending on the camera. So the entire pipeline and results are different.
They are 2 different aesthetic choices that can't be compared. The more fair comparison would be comparing Japanese anime from 80-early 90s when every frame were hand-drawn v.s today's anime with more 3D camera/object rotation and special effects.
I've been watching Japanese anime since 80s, and I still watch super old classic anime from 70s occasionally. Personally I still think current gen anime looks way better than 80-90s anime with better cinematography and lighting/effects thanks to 3D technology. (Ignoring the design style, which is more of a preference).
Edit: decided to quickly re-check 2D gundams from the 80s gundam anime as I typed this, immediately I found 3 perspective errors when these hand drawn 2D gundams move and rotate.... THAT is uncanny valley to me lol.
Yeah, 3D gundams in 2022 gundam anime looked way better to me, at least they can rotate more accurately. No reason to hate 3D in anime imo.