It’s because sampling artifacts never disappear with Box. The reason is the high frequency aliasing is introduced by the filtering. It’s because the Box itself has infinite frequency response that you cannot eliminate the artifacts, it’s not possible. This is why all other, better filters fade their weight smoothly to zero at the support boundary.
You can see this with a single sharp edge, it doesn’t need to involve multiple polygons, nor even vector rendering, it happens when downsampling images too.
These are sampling artifacts, but I believe yorbwa is correct in distinguishing these from conflation artifacts, as defined in Kilgard & Bolz. I think of the latter as compositing not commuting exactly with antialiasing (sampling). You only get conflation artifacts when compositing multiple shapes (or rendering a single shape using analytical area when the winding number is not everywhere 0 or 1), while you definitely see aliasing when rendering a single shape, say a Siemens star.
Okay, that’s fair. I’m misusing the term ‘conflation’ in that sense. I was trying to make the point that compositing two wrong answers yields a wrong answer, but I stand corrected that it’s not the compositing that’s introducing error, it is the sampling + box-filtering.
You can see this with a single sharp edge, it doesn’t need to involve multiple polygons, nor even vector rendering, it happens when downsampling images too.