"Hubris: Redux" is a pretty good description of my entire career.
The high points, anyway. The parts worth remembering.
Something I am taking away from this, is every optimization he makes here, takes away from the technologies supporting the overall dynamism of the scene, "dynamism" in terms of things interacting with things. The long solution might well be a very tightly described engine of "dynamism" - data formats, algorithms - that then feeds an optimized splat renderer, millisecond by millisecond.
There's an interesting recent Siggraph paper on scaling up Gaussian splatting in a very different way, which offers some interesting benefits; Gaussian point splatting.
The biggest update is adding alpha compensation (alpha > 1). With this in place we can addresses the gaps that appear after performing many rounds of decimation.
If I understand what you are saying, it might be that your phone had a better camera than your ipad? The depth of field and atmospheric lens effects aren't really what you want - a pinhole lens like old phones (and my flir) works better since blur is the enemy.
https://trianglesplatting.github.io/