People on all platforms could play the same game with each other.

It was written in Java, and was the same on Windows, macOS and Linux (and any other platform with a Java runtime). There used to be a game called Minecraft. As you walk around, the game is inventing the world 65k blocks at a time!) (And remember, in minecraft, chunk generation occurs live too. So whatever we do to turn voxels into polygons, we're going to likely be doing it across an enormous amount of data (relative to a home computer). In minecraft, a chunk is up to 16x255x16 or 65,536 voxels, and with a view distance of 10, that's 21x21 or 441 chunks loaded, with up to 28,901,376 voxels in memory.

I think the reality is that in Minecraft for example, every voxel is in memory, including the 99% of them you can't see. Blocks turn out to be fast/cheap to render and are highly usable in gaming mechanics. But at the end of the day it comes down to triangles or rays, right? So that voxel data has to be turned into polygons sooner or later, and the more magic you do to it, the less coherent these polygons are as a gaming mechanic.

There are voxel rendering techniques as well. Minecraft stores data as voxels but renders as polygons (blocks). Smooth of voxel terrain isn't new, ultimately it doesn't play well so it isn't included in most voxel games.

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