If I am skimming this correctly then apparently the Neo-Geo used sprites for everything, except a "fixed" tilemap layer that always appeared over the sprites, and was pretty much only useful for score/status kinds of things?

And the Neo-Geo looks to have been capable of displaying 7k sprites at once?

Damn, that's a hell of a choice.

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Looking at the Neo-Geo dev wiki: https://wiki.neogeodev.org/index.php?title=Sprites - sprites are vertical strips of 16x16px tiles, from 1-32 tiles high; only 96 sprites can be displayed on any particular scanline. The hardware has support for linking them together to create wider game objects.

One scanline is 384px, so if you want to fill the screen with a tilemap made of sprites, you're gonna eat up 24 of those sprites, leaving you 72 for other stuff. You could probably use another couple dozen sprites for some sparse parallax layers and still have a decent number of them left for game objects. That feels really weird compared to other console architectures I've read about, there's normally a pretty strong division between tilemaps/bitmaps and sprites.