Couple of observations -

An 8 bit grayscale map used for displacement has 256 levels of gray - thinking of it in height terms, that's 256 steps from highest point to lowest.

A 16 bit grayscale map has over 65 thousand levels of gray. A lot more steps, so better quality.

Redoing the original test with a 16 bit map would improve the result, though memory would take a hit and I would expect the render to be slower as you'd be adding more data for the renderer to calculate.

The other way in P10+ to improve the render when using displacement would be to add render subD - again, performance would suffer but the end result would be better. I'll post an example of what I mean shortly.

I agree that it can be useful or not depending on the particular situation. For cloth, it may be useful on very tight clothing but not for a looser fitting garment - folds move with the figure underneath. For figures I would also rather have enough mesh density to enable good quality morphs as that would be far more flexible than relying on maps to carry secondary detail like muscles. For skin detail like pores and fine wrinkles, bump or normal maps would be better as the silhouette of the figure is not going to be affected.

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