I think I do. The point is that you can build your video in Affect Effects locally at 1080p (or less) on a standard Macbook, and then render the video in the cloud at 8k really easily and at quite a low cost. You don't need to "do X on your Y machine". You can rent someone else's machine for that.
So, let's actually look at that. For a "low-budget" 8K pipeline you'd first need a camera that can shoot at 8K or more. Ideally you'd want more so you can crop-in or do stabilization in post. So you'd be shooting on the Blackmagic Ursa Mini Pro 12K (~$6k) [1].
Usually you're using 5-10% of the material that you shot in the final edit, for some movies that can go as low as 1% (e.g., Apocalypse Now [2]), but let's calculate with a 45min documentary and 7.5% material used.
That means you've now got 30 TB of raw material [3]. You'll obviously use proxies for editing, but at least for color grading and for delivery you'll need access to the full material.
So now you'll need to store 30 TB of raw material somewhere in the cloud accessible to the machine that's doing the delivery. Even assuming you've got a symmetric fiber connection so we can disregard potential traffic limits and transfer speeds for initially uploading the material, you'll still need to pay for the cloud storage.
Creative Cloud has a storage limit of 100 GB for individuals or 1 TB for business plans [4], which is obviously far too limiting, so you'd need to use something like LucidLink. As you'd be working with large video files, you'd need high-performance storage, so you'd have to calculate with their performance plan, which is another $80 per TB per month, so $2400 per month just for this one single project [5].
And of course all of the above may be "peanuts" for professional studios, but I am not aware of any hardware/workflow/money/things you can throw at the problem to make the editing and production experience smooth. There are tons of inconveniences, practical barriers, bandwidth issues (and I'm not even talking about network/cloud bandwidth, that's a whole other thing-- even just disk IO, moving stuff around via USB-C, backing up stuff, etc... It's all super labour-intensive and annoying).
Well, if you're editing with proxies (which is really easy with Resolve or Media Composer), the editing experience is really smooth. But that doesn't help for grading or delivery, where you'll still need the full resolution files.
Even with Gen 4 NVMe storage you'll quickly hit bottlenecks at those resolutions.
You'd be surprised at how much buffering and loading is needed to just playback 1080p content (even directly from your local machine's built-in SSD) in the video editor before it's rendered. It's incredibly frustrating to do video work on "regular"/prosumer (macbook pro) hardware.
