I personally took the blogpost seriously because, if you see the discussion in the comments, the torchvision library authors actually made modifications to their library based on that post. In hindsight, many of the comparisons are a bit dubious, although they’re not wrong on all points. Thank you both for the clarifications and suggestions.
I looked at the source code for some of these resize algorithms implemented by torchvision, and in some paths/interpolation types they apply the filter multiple times in-between steps. So it’s not just one filter, otherwise I’d have done it myself as a preprocessing step.
It does matter to have the ability to reproduce the same preprocessing for models in opencv, if it wants to serve as a library used for ML. I can work around the issue for now, but it’d be nice to have the option in opencv as an option. I think I’ll put in a ticket.