Brecht’s videos show off improved rendering. I think the person you’re replying to is instead referring to viewport performance in general: scene complexity and size, undo performance, framerate, responsiveness, that sort of thing.
1999 seems pretty late into the evolution of the web for a creator to be so concerned with scattered instances of their work being shared online. 1995-96 I'd believe--the web was mostly still new, norms hadn't adjusted to its presence. But by 1999, the web was well underway, and it would've been weird for random scans of comic strips not to be found freely in all corners of the internet. Did he really email hundreds of site owners?
(Unless the places he was sending his form letter to were hosting most of his back catalog, which would amount to full-scale piracy.)
What the. I thought I recognized that book instantly upon seeing that preview of it and skimming the article, but the fact that it had been released only a few years ago made no sense to me--I was sure I'd seen previews of it something like 15 years ago, and then I suddenly remembered, vividly, how eerie it had seemed at the time, and I remembered being in this same house I'm in right now, looking at it online and feeling weirded out. But just now, after more reading, I found out the book is based on some earlier and similar black and white pages he'd drawn back in 1989 for Raw magazine, which must've been what I saw online 15 years ago.
So basically the last 10 minutes of my life have been super weird and totally appropriate in the context of that dude's work. Gaaah. Thanks for the link, and the bizarre meta experience I just had.