Apple's online WWDC content has very good production value, but a bunch of well-produced videos dropped over the course of a week don't really make it a "conference".

Microsoft, with their BUILD conference a couple years ago, actually had the best implementation of a COVID-era virtual "conference" that I've seen-- lots of actual live content (and live chat interaction), and to some extent some of the content was actually superior to a real-world conference because the online format (taking questions via chat) makes Q&A more feasible than it would be in person.

As someone who worked on the programming team for Build in 2020 and 2021, thanks for saying that. In 2020, especially, it was really difficult to pivot with as little time as we had. We did most of our stuff in 2020 live, even though it was remote (a few of us were in the studio but most people were at home), because we didn’t have the lead time to make it a well-produced pre-recorded thing. We were “live” across time zones (meaning people in the US (like myself), were often working at 3am, in order to bring live content to other parts of the world), for an ungodly amount of time, and the fact that it didn’t break was really great. Even though we had more production time in 2021, we still did a lot of live content (with on-demand, of course), across time zones, and focused on more breakout sessions too.

I’m not at Microsoft anymore (tho I might still do some stuff for Build this year, since I’m at GitHub), but being part of the team that got Build 2020 across the finish line is one of the things I’m most proud of. Microsoft was the first to do a tech conference in the pandemic (Google canceled, Facebook might have too), so we really didn’t have anything to base it off of.

Apple, naturally, just knocked it out of the park with the production values, but I’ll always love the scrappy nature of Build 2020.

Presumably OP meant "after covid was a thing" and not "after covid was over" (which will never happen)