Content over 4k is readily available and even cheap to produce, but most of the good stuff is still being produced in 4k, so why is that???
(Yes, I know that you do X on your Y machine without problem, but my point is that it’s easy to forget to account for all these little costs, and they pile up! Especially for professional workloads where people love to push the bar higher and higher.)
A good high-quality 1080p export will have significantly higher perceived quality than a "4K" (UHD) video on YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime or Apple TV.
I've decided that I'll produce all content in 1080p at the current time, even though I'm recording video in DCI 4K oversampled from a 6K sensor. No viewer is ever going to see the difference anyway.
Customers are also not as willing to pay for 4k as those invested in UHD would like to think. It's a "nice to have" and having big numbers makes people feel good, but it doesn't actually make them love the content more.
Cloud-based After Effects render farms do help significantly though.
So, let's actually look at that. For a "low-budget" 8K pipeline you'd first need a camera that can shoot at 8K or more. Ideally you'd want more so you can crop-in or do stabilization in post. So you'd be shooting on the Blackmagic Ursa Mini Pro 12K (~$6k) [1].
Usually you're using 5-10% of the material that you shot in the final edit, for some movies that can go as low as 1% (e.g., Apocalypse Now [2]), but let's calculate with a 45min documentary and 7.5% material used.
That means you've now got 30 TB of raw material [3]. You'll obviously use proxies for editing, but at least for color grading and for delivery you'll need access to the full material.
So now you'll need to store 30 TB of raw material somewhere in the cloud accessible to the machine that's doing the delivery. Even assuming you've got a symmetric fiber connection so we can disregard potential traffic limits and transfer speeds for initially uploading the material, you'll still need to pay for the cloud storage.
Creative Cloud has a storage limit of 100 GB for individuals or 1 TB for business plans [4], which is obviously far too limiting, so you'd need to use something like LucidLink. As you'd be working with large video files, you'd need high-performance storage, so you'd have to calculate with their performance plan, which is another $80 per TB per month, so $2400 per month just for this one single project [5].
________________________
[1] https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1578059-REG/blackmagi...
[2] https://books.google.de/books/about/?id=wB7cAAAAMAAJ
[3] https://www.braw.info/capacity/
Even with Gen 4 NVMe storage you'll quickly hit bottlenecks at those resolutions.
A lot of that is on Adobe more than anything else, mind you. Same with Premiere, too. These tasks can be a lot faster than Adobe software allows them to be. But there is a limit, of course
But realistically, a lot of work happens on Adobe or other (Autodesk, Houdini, etc...) products that also have their own issues.
A lot of people are watching content on their phones, for one thing.
I create some travel video content and up until last year, most of my clients weren't even fussed about 4K. I had been shooting at 5.1K for most of last year and then dropped to 4K this year because no one has needed it, but the storage and delivery costs are higher.
So, while the pipeline might not run at more than 4K, the source material ideally is at a higher resolution.
And you need to make sure it still looks good on lower quality displays.
Besides which, we took a big step back when we switched from 35mm to digital. Digital has only recently reached par quality.
Only now do some manufacturers start to put out taller monitors, but they're still rare, at least in my market.
It is not just replacing one screen for another on client's side.