E.g. what's the benefit of using splats vs traditional polygons? is it somehow easier for the neural network to create these from the 2D photos? or what's the magic behind this?
Splats however are loose points. It’s harder to get a solid appearance from them. But, you can add/remove/move each point independently.
Splats don’t really use neural techniques. But, they are well set up for neural techniques to work with them. Generating the splats from photos uses some sort of linear algebra optimization/back-propagation. The Gaussian aspect is required to enable that to work because gaussians are differentiable. Hopefully that means GS should fit in well with recent advancements in differentiable rendering.
Think of this as a LiDAR visualization on steroids... A point cloud of information that can be used to render "The Blob".