Ideas around point-based rendering have been around for a long time. But, have not been widely used. Hollywood and games might use them for smoke, water, explosions, but rarely for solid objects.

There has been a big explosion of interest in the area since this release of https://repo-sam.inria.fr/fungraph/3d-gaussian-splatting/ which proposed a way to generate the point cloud data from photographs in a way that is procedurally a lot like photogrammetry. Hundreds of research projects have spawned off of that paper.