I think one thing that a lot of folks tend to forget is that quad and tri meshes are only one of SEVERAL 3d modeling techniques. It just so happens that this is the technique that the world landed on in the 90s due to how flexible it is, how performant it is, and algorithms like Catmull-Clark subdivision.
Remember, Toy Story 1 actually used NURB surfaces for all the characters! For a Bug's Life and Toy Story 2, they redid all the meshes as catmull-clark subdividable surfaces. And guess who was CEO and founder of Pixar?
There also techniques like NURBs, signed distance fields, and metaballs (all stuff you can actually use in Blender) for generating 3d surfaces. And of course the techniques used in CAD software.
With the right algorithm and sufficient compute, there could be some sort of completely alternate 3d representation in the future for creating virtual spaces.